The Risk Pool

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said, returning to the table in time to see his new opponent drop the eight ball.

  Drew Littler set a fresh beer down next to the one that was still three-quarters full. Marion had drained her Seven and Seven, but he’d just bought beers for the two of us. “You know who stole that two hundred from my old lady?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Me,” he replied. “Who’d you think?”

  I took a swig of beer. “At least you’re honest.”

  He nodded. “At least I’m honest. Your old man thinks I’m no good.”

  There was little point in denying that, so I didn’t. “Don’t let it worry you,” I said. “He was telling me earlier that he was no good himself.”

  He studied me for a minute, as if considering all of the ramifications of this intelligence. But when he finally spoke, I couldn’t be sure he’d even heard. “The only person in the whole world who thinks I’m good for something is my mother. Maybe this’ll teach her.”

  I said I didn’t think so.

  “Me either,” he said. “Women are dumb. Speaking of which.”

  “Hi.” Marion slid back into the booth. “You two decide not to argue?”

  “We sure did,” I told her.

  “Good,” she said, then to me, “You’re a bad boy. I watched the whole end of that game and nobody threw their stick.”

  “Cue,” I said.

  “You know what I hear?” Drew Littler said to Marion, who had noticed our fresh beers and her own empty Seven and Seven. “Old Nedley here’s been slipping it to my little sister.”

  Again, nobody said anything for a second.

  “Well, that does it,” Marion said, sliding back out of the booth again. “Here I thought I was going to have a fun night off for once.” When neither Drew nor I offered an explanation for why her modest expectation hadn’t materialized, she said, “I just don’t see why people have to act so mean.” And then she headed for the door, hips and breasts all astir.

  “Hey,” Drew Littler said, suddenly confidential now that we were alone. “Remember how we’d go up there on the Harley and sit outside the gate?”

  “And you said it would all be yours one day.”

  “I never figured on him dying like that,” he said. “What a hell of a night that was. You remember that night?”

  I said I did.

  “I never knew for sure until then,” he said. “When your own father dies, you know … in here.” He thumped his massive chest. “That’s how I knew for sure.”

  “You went out there today,” I said, remembering the strange sound of Tria’s voice on the phone when she said they had a “situation.”

  “What a night,” he nodded. “What a goddamn night. More than anybody knew.”

  I couldn’t tell, either from looking at him or listening to the sound of his voice, whether he was in the present or back ten years ago on the night it had taken my father and Wussy and Skinny Donovan and his mother and, finally, a doctor with a horse tranquilizer to fell him into welcome oblivion. And he’d been smaller then. Now he was bigger than my father and Wussy put together, and there was no Skinny Donovan to kick him in the head if they were lucky enough to get him down, and no doctor handy with a long needle.

  My father was right. He was big as a house.

  All the lights were out in the Ward house when I drove up and parked in the circular drive. Mohawk, or a small part of it, glittered below and I cut the engine to listen to the quiet, hoping that Tria wouldn’t be asleep, that she’d peek out the window and see me sitting there in my father’s convertible. And not call the cops.

  Not that I’d have blamed her much if she did. It was after midnight, which made me about six hours late, by conservative estimate. Six hours during which she would have had time to consider what, if anything, our becoming lovers the night before had meant to me. I was about to drive back down the hill and into town when a lawn chair shifted on the small enclosed patio a few feet away and a cigarette glowed red and died. In the dark I couldn’t tell from the silhouette whether it was Tria or her mother. I didn’t want to be wrong.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  I climbed up and sat on the back of the front seat, unsure of my current status. “And a lot I do.”

  “I’ve regretted that about a dozen times today.” Her voice was silky in the dark and I suddenly had a different regret of my own.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m sorry you feel that way. Because I don’t.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you to wonder if I was on the pill?”

  “I did actually, once or twice.”

  “Well, I am, so you don’t have to worry. Or run away.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Can I join you? I feel like an idiot all the way over here.”

  “Stay there, then. Feel like an idiot.”

  I did. Both.

  “I’m the idiot,” she said after a minute. “We’re all crazy in this family.”

  Her use of the word “all” spooked me. After all, there was just herself and her mother, unless she was including her father in the equation. Or unless Drew Littler had convinced her to think of him as family.

  My eyes had adjusted to the dark now and I could see her better. She was barefoot and wearing a thin robe that reached only to the knees. Her dark hair was down around her shoulders the way I liked it.

  “Did I tell you why I left Swarthmore?” she said.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “I was on academic probation,” she said. “Valedictorian of St. Mary’s, class of ’67. Academic probation, ’68. Guess how much I studied.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “I never studied much the first couple years.”

  “I studied every night. Every minute.”

  If she’d planned to surprise me, she had. My own experience had been that even the appearance of industry could sucker a B out of most professors. Academic probation was strictly for alcoholics, scholarship athletes, fraternity men, and those who hadn’t discovered the college of education. “There are big differences between colleges,” I said, for something to say. “I didn’t go to Swarthmore, or anywhere close.”

  “You’re smart though,” she said. “I’m just smart enough to know when other people are smart. Daddy was smart. I remember that about him. Mother thinks she is, but she isn’t.”

  “Does it matter so much?”

  “Yes,” she said. “When people tell you that you are, and you believe them, and it turns out that you’re not, it’s important. It makes you wonder what else you’ve been wrong about. Maybe everything. I was told today that I had a brother I didn’t even know about.”

  “If you believe anything Drew Littler tells you then you’re right about not being too smart.”

  “I do believe him,” she said stubbornly, happy to have tricked me into admitting her stupidity. “So does my mother.”

  “No she doesn’t,” I heard myself say. “She just hates your father. It suits her to think of him as a continuing embarrassment. Now she’s got another cross to bear.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “Believe it,” I told her. “I’m smart, remember?”

  “Anyway,” she said. “It’s too terrible not to be true.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, not caring much about the truth of it. “He just wants it to be true. He doesn’t know. His mother may not even know.”

  “He knows,” Tria said.

  “He believes,” I said.

  “So do I, then,” she said, even more stubbornly than before.

  “I’m going home,” I said after a long silence. “It’ll probably look different in the morning. If you imagine Drew Littler’s related to you, it’s because you haven’t seen him in natural light.”

  “He’s a horrible person, isn’t he?”

  I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I s
aid, feeling immediately a deep twinge of conscience without knowing exactly why. Perhaps it was because this wisdom on the subject of Drew Littler was so conventional, universal even, that my contribution was unnecessary, even cruel. Perhaps it was because I had known him as a boy, before the verdict was in. Or that the part of me where wishful thinking held sway wasn’t sure the verdict was in.

  I slid down behind the wheel of my father’s convertible, my hand on the ignition key.

  “He mentioned you today,” Tria said.

  “Really?” I didn’t want to know what he’d said.

  “He said you were sweet.”

  “Sweet?” I tried to imagine Drew Littler saying that.

  “He said you hate choosing sides in things.”

  “He remembers the way I was when we were boys.”

  “Last night, I thought you were sweet,” she said.

  “And now?”

  “I think you’ve chosen sides.”

  I dropped the convertible off in front of the jewelry store, right where my father could find it in the morning. I’d started home on foot when the door to the tavern across the street was flung open and my father came out and weaved across the street. He never noticed the car and wouldn’t have noticed me either if I hadn’t called out to him.

  “Hello, son,” he said seriously, his legs waffling.

  “I brought the car back,” I said, nodding to it.

  “There it is,” he said, apparently surprised to discover it so close. “Take it home. Bring it back tomorrow. The next day. Whenever.”

  “I’m going to walk,” I said.

  “Take it,” he insisted.

  I told him I really wanted to walk, and he shrugged. “You want to come up a minute? Crash here if you want.”

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Listen,” I said. “This thing with Drew. You can walk away from it. He doesn’t want any trouble. He likes you.”

  “I know it,” my father said. “That’s the weird part.”

  “It’s all weird,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Tell your dolly not to worry. I’ll take care of him.”

  “You know what he wants then?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Can’t you just get Eileen to tell him Jack Ward wasn’t his father?”

  “Kinda tough,” my father said.

  “Why?” I said stupidly.

  “Because he was. Probably.”

  Probably.

  In the end it was a mere word that sent me packing, in high moral indignation and fear, before the summer was over. In fact, I nearly left that night. I had a few hundred dollars saved, enough to get me a fair distance if I didn’t care how I traveled and didn’t mind ending up broke when I got there. And I didn’t care, not that night.

  It seemed to me, as I headed home along the dark quiet streets of Mohawk, that the whole world suffered from an epic lack of understanding, an epic surplus of probablies. Nobody knew what they needed to know, and because of it, things were slipping away. Inside the black houses that lined the streets, people were sleeping blissfully, the hot day having finally surrendered to reassuring breezes in the tops of the trees, but in a few hours tomorrow would dawn hot and, it seemed to me, tragic. Probably. After all, today had begun with Skinny Donovan’s death and ended with a series of reverberations, aftershocks from twenty-five years in the past. This time the night before, Tria Ward and I had sat together on the closed-in patio overlooking the city and watched the gathering storm. It will blow and blow and not amount to anything, Tria had said, but it did amount to something just the same, as she may have feared it would.

  A day later, I had not found the courage to go to her until it was too late, and now, as I headed toward my mother’s house along a sleepy street under a clear night sky, I was more than anything relieved. It was as if she herself had given me the antidote to loving her, allowed me the privileged glimpse of the beginnings of the transformation I’d long feared would someday take place. There in the dark, until she’d spoken, I’d not been able to tell her from her mother, and even when she did speak I’d heard a bitter inflection in the tone of her voice that was directly traceable to Hilda Ward. Tomorrow, a month from now, a year, I’d wake up and find my Tria—and Jack Ward’s Tria—gone, the transformation complete. It would take no longer than it took for the young Hilda Smythe of the library photographs to go from young woman to mummy. Perhaps Tria herself could see it coming. Perhaps that was what she’d been trying to warn me about when she said that things at the Ward house were always normal. She bore the legacy of a superficially charming and opportunistic father, of a mother shrunken and ruined for life and love by the father she idealized, a third-rate chronicler of arcane history and, apparently, a first-rate deceiver of worshipful children. And, to my shame, there was one other person I held against her. As she herself had remarked, it was too terrible not to be true.

  My beloved was what she came from. After a few blessed years, sustained by some conjurer’s trick, I would not be able to tell mother and daughter apart in a well-lit room. And then what would I probably do? Probably what her father did, or what my father did, or some unimaginative synthesis of these two Mohawk paradigms. For if Tria was her mother, then what on earth was I? Wasn’t I the same shabby conjurer’s trick? Had Tria come looking for me earlier in the evening, gone from dim smoky bar to dim smoky bar, surveying from the entryways the shadowy figures down the long bars, spying my father and me on adjacent stools, hunched over sweating beer bottles, wouldn’t she too have been granted a glimpse of the future? And as she came toward us through the smoke, would she not fear for a brief instant that she had my father and me confused, and known in that moment what the future held—herself alone in her mother’s house, except for the old woman, truly old and sick now, shrunken doll-size in her king-size bed, while I sported with Marion and Mohawk’s other sporting men at the Big Bend Hunting Lodge?

  And somewhere in this awful mix, a monster, slouching among our separate existences. Made terrible because, unlike Tria and myself, he had no blueprint to follow, nothing clear in his mind to become. Nothing. Zero. But nothing grown huge, as big as a house, with one simple crazy philosophy—“What’s mine is mine”—and imagining he could wring it free, whatever was desired, by brute force, by will.

  These were the alcoholic phantoms that pursued me along the narrow Mohawk avenues until finally, the third time I arrived in front of the house that contained my mother’s flat, I climbed the back stairs and found her sitting quietly puffy-eyed at the kitchen table, as patiently despairing and hopeful as she had been the afternoon my father had returned me, scratched and swollen and riddled with poison ivy, to her doorstep for repair. Her eyes now contained that same terrible sadness, submerged deep and quiet. And for a brief moment I felt I was her son again, the son of this strange woman who had tried her best to save me from probably.

  38

  The following Monday afternoon, Tree came in after his shift out at the campsite where during the summer he still sat in the same little shack and sold parking tickets to bathers. The arm he dangled out the window was berry-brown, the other fish-white, like the rest of him. I drew him a beer and he nodded to Irma, Mike’s wife, when she emerged from the steamy kitchen and glowered at him for no particular reason. Tree was scared of women in general and very frightened of Irma. For as long as he could remember, he’d always had at least one big woman mad at him, and over the years he’d come to the conclusion that there must be something about his looks that did it to them, especially the big ones. Irma was a sizable woman, though not nearly as big as the two women he’d married. He gave her wide berth, just the same, as if he feared he might fall in love with Irma and marry her too. Her glowering at him all the time struck Tree as a dare. She glowered the same way at everybody, but her genuine ill humor had special meaning for Tree, who mistook it for foreplay. When he spoke, it was to a neutral spot on the wall that neither inclu
ded nor excluded Irma. “Some r-r-ruckus over to The Bachelors last night.”

  The Bachelors was a nightspot on the lake road that catered to phony ID’s. Anybody who couldn’t start a fight at the pool hall went out there.

  “Assholes,” Irma said. It was her standard comment.

  “I’m with y-you, Irma,” Tree said, still fixed on the same point on the wall. “You couldn’t p-pay me to go out there. You know what they get for a draw?”

  Nobody knew.

  “Ninety-five cents,” Tree said indignantly. “No b-bigger’n what you get right here. Hell, I’d stay home before I’d p-pay that for a g-goddamn draw.”

  “You should go out to the Holiday Inn,” somebody said. “It’s a buck fifteen.”

  “For a shot and beer, right?” Tree said.

  “Shit no. Just the draw.”

  “Shot and a b-beer’d be different,” Tree said.

  “You should go to New York City,” somebody else offered.

  “What the hell for?”

  “What’s a shot’n’beer go for there?”

  The guy who said we should go to New York hadn’t been there himself, but he’d heard about it and said you couldn’t get drunk on less than a week’s pay.

  “What happened at The Bachelors?” I said, so Tree’s original observation would not be lost entirely.

  “Hell of a ruckus is what,” said the guy who told us we should go to New York.

  Tree looked at him blackly. He hadn’t brought up the business at The Bachelors to surrender the tale to an interloper. “B-bouncer b-busted up a couple kids around midnight. Tossed ’em out in the p-parking lot. They come back with some friends around closing and b-beat the bejesus out of him with two-b’fours. Left him in the dumpster.”

  “Killed him?” the man wanted to know.

  “Damn near,” Tree said.

  “Their own fault for hiring nigger bouncers out there.”

  “B-bullshit,” Tree said. “It was Dick Krause’s kid.”

  “Benny?”

  “How do I know?” Tree said. There were limits to what a man could know, and he had reached his with regard to what had happened out at The Bachelors.