The Risk Pool

  Seeing the modest edition, every copy of which was displayed in Ford’s window, unless there was a carton or two in the den of the Ward house, made me feel sad for Tria’s mother, because her plan for her father’s work was nothing less than grandiose. I learned of it gradually that summer when she became the companion of my evenings. Meeting me at the front door, she would insist that I have “something cool, you know” before I sat down to work. Then she would tell me about her father, who seemed to me, even as Mrs. Ward described him, nearly as frozen as his syntax. That she worshiped him beyond measure was evident. That his ghost had intruded into her and her husband’s bedroom seemed to me both then and now as the safest of inferences. That he had whispered counsel to her on long nights when Jack Ward did not come home, perhaps even the odd “I-told-you-so,” was also a good bet. I doubt Mrs. Ward ever looked at her husband without imagining her father standing there beside him for the purposes of comparison.

  And when Jack Ward had died, the ultimate I-told-you-so, Mrs. Ward had meekly returned to her father and begun to formulate her plan to offer him to the community. He had helped her through a bad marriage, saved her life by providing such a stern model of upright behavior. She began to see that it was wrong to keep such a man for her own private use when the entire community was in such dire need of a paradigm, an example of rectitude beyond reproach. Mohawk, Mrs. Ward explained to me, was a town that had lost its pride, its sense of self-worth, its recollections of its own pioneer history. The hearty men and women who had driven the savage Iroquois north and west, built long roads through the dark forest, erected churches and established settlements, had not been drunkards and fornicators and welfare recipients. They had been strong, earnest, God-fearing men and women who knew adversity, self-sacrifice and hard times. And when they’d won their battle with the wilderness and the wild heathens who had roamed the forest, these men begat scholars—men of intellectual courage and wisdom like her father, who had bequeathed to subsequent generations the gift of memory, the knowledge of great times and deeds.

  If Mohawk could just be introduced to her father, Mrs. Ward felt certain, then the whole community would rediscover the pride that had lain dormant for so long. In the beginning she had doubted she would be able to go through with it—sharing her father with the world, that is. But then she realized that he was large, that he contained multitudes. And again he whispered in her ear, confirmed the wisdom of the course she had chosen. Use me, he had bravely insisted, and so she would. Because it wasn’t just Mohawk, after all. There were towns all over the nation that would benefit. Didn’t most Americans, even those now living—if you could call it living—in the hateful big cities, didn’t they have their roots in places like the young Mohawk? Wouldn’t all Americans answer the call to remember if sufficiently motivated?

  She was thinking best seller. And who could blame her? After all, she was broke. As stony as stony could be. It was Tria who confirmed this later, when my work on the history was done, after Wussy, whose travels were wide and contacts myriad, came into Mike’s one afternoon and wanted to know what the hell Jack Ward’s daughter wanted with working as a cocktail waitress in Amsterdam. I said I was sure I didn’t know. He’d probably heard wrong. But I knew he hadn’t. Unlike just about everybody in Mohawk, Wussy’s information was usually correct. Besides, as Tria herself had observed, some things were too terrible to be anything but true.

  The night I drove to Amsterdam I passed the fairgrounds and saw the first tent going up. Summer had flown. Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter. I thought of my own grandfather and felt a degree of sympathy for Mrs. Ward’s warped nostalgic view of things. Indeed, a great deal of territory had been surrendered since our ancestors had stolen the land and erected white churches with felled trees. Up and down the Mohawk valley the green world had gone brown and gray, and the people who lived beneath the smokestacks and in the shadows of the tanneries were scared that even the brown and gray might not last. They didn’t know what came after brown and gray, and neither did I. One thing was for sure. Each Mohawk Fair was sadder and grayer than the last. And winter followed. With a capital W.

  Tria’s boss at the T-Pee Lounge let her take five minutes. She looked like she’d been expecting me, sure I’d tumble to the truth eventually. The house, she explained, was paid for, but the money my father had once told me was impossible to spend was gone. And as more and more of the county was added to the welfare rolls, property taxes had increased proportionally. Jack Ward’s army pension covered taxes, but not much else.

  There in the dim light of the T-Pee Lounge I fell in love with Tria Ward all over again, and she let me hold her hand as we spoke. “It’s a monster,” I said. “Why doesn’t she just sell it? Get an apartment, live off the sale?”

  “Sell Grandfather’s house?”

  “Yes. Sell it. It’s not a national shrine.”

  “She has this idea that it will be.”

  After a minute, I said, “You can make her do the right thing.”

  But she looked at me as if she couldn’t think what I might mean. Maybe I didn’t know myself.

  “I’m going to leave in a week or so,” I said finally. Our five minutes had stretched to fifteen, and Tria was getting looks. “Come with me. We’ll go someplace where the sun shines. And play house.” When the attempt at humor fell flat, I added, “We never gave it much of a chance, you know.”

  “It never had much of a chance, Ned.”

  Maybe she was right, but on the drive back to Mohawk I thought of all the arguments I should have used. Tria’s mother, who rambled on about pioneer spirit, certainly didn’t possess much. She didn’t drive, you know. She didn’t type, you know. She freely admitted that when skills were parceled out, you know, she had somehow been passed over. Her talent, you see, was simply as a witness. She had been called to witness her father’s greatness, and she accepted her calling, you see. I don’t know what she imagined her daughter’s role might be. To witness the witness, perhaps. To chauffeur the witness up and down the tree-lined drive, to the market, the drugstore, the grave. Before this last, people would mistake them for sisters.

  I looked everywhere for my father and finally found him, of all places, at home. Stretched out on the sofa, he snorted awake when I came in. Locking doors was foreign to his nature.

  “Nice place you got here,” I said.

  He looked around to see if this could be true. “You haven’t been up here before?” he said, and it was clear he honestly couldn’t remember.

  “Twice,” I admitted. “How about you?”

  He switched off the television, which had been keeping him company while he slept. “Not enough. From now on I’m gonna have to stay here a little more.”

  “Why’s that,” I said, rearranging some of the dirty work clothes he’d draped over the chair so I could sit down.

  “You want a beer?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “Good,” he said. “We’d have to go to the store. Coffee?”

  He was rummaging through the tiny kitchen cabinets like an explorer.

  I told him no thanks.

  “Got some of that, someplace,” he said. “I’m never here except at night, and I don’t drink it then or I’d have to get up ten times.”

  He found a full jar of instant and held it up so I could see. I shook my head, said I was fine.

  “I bought it the last time I said I was going to start staying home. Then I went out and forgot about it.”

  “I had one in Tucson just like it,” I told him.

  “Think you’ll go back there?”

  I shook my head.

  “How come?”

  “Nothing there for me,” I admitted.

  “What’s here for you? You want to tend bar the rest of your life?”

  This seemed to me a rhetorical question, but I should have known better.

  “Do you?” he said. “Or work in some mill?”

  I said no.

  “Pr
etty much takes care of Mohawk, doesn’t it?”

  All true. And I had decided to leave, after all. I wasn’t even sure why I was in my father’s apartment discussing it. What was I hoping for? To be talked out of it? To be reassured that it was the only sensible course? To be given the opportunity to explain?

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Time I slowed down a step anyhow.”

  “Or two steps,” I said. “I don’t know how you do it every night.”

  He shrugged, as if it were a mystery to him too. “To hell with it. For a while, anyhow.”

  Neither of us said anything for a minute.

  “I’d like to go out right now,” he admitted, “but to hell with it. I was meaning to ask … was it Eileen that called you back in the spring?”

  I told him yes. I couldn’t think of any reason not to now. Even Sam Hall couldn’t get pissed off over a six-month-old indiscretion.

  “She’s a good girl,” he said.

  I said I thought so too. “In fact, you should make things up, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I know it,” he said. “I think I’ll wait till Numb Nuts goes back to jail though. How long can that be?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How long?”

  Maybe too long, I thought, remembering Eileen’s remark that she was just about over my father. But I said, “Not too long.”

  “You’re damn right.”

  “Anyway,” I said. “I came over to cheer you up. Remember how you used to tell me Jack Ward was trying like hell to spend all the money he married?”

  “He couldn’t do it, either.”

  “Well, as it turns out, he did. Anyway, there’s nothing left now but the house and what’s in it.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” he said. “There’s some wells that don’t have bottoms. That’s one of them.”

  I told him what Tria’d told me, leaving out that she was working as a cocktail waitress, which wasn’t anybody’s business. But he wouldn’t buy a word of it. “Take my advice,” he said. “Wait till the old lady kicks off and then start digging in the flower beds. Keep digging till you find it. She’s probably got it buried all the way down to the highway.

  “It would be nice if you were right.”

  “I am,” he said, so confidently that I realized that I had challenged some article of his faith. “Some people are born lucky. You can’t do a thing to change it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”

  “Well, it’s true whether you believe it or not.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Funny thing happened this morning,” he said seriously. “I’m over in the drugstore …” he nodded out the unshaded window and across the street. “I gotta get a couple a things. Some razor blades in case I want to shave again. A tube of toothpaste. Suddenly there’s this girl in a wheelchair. I don’t know her. Never saw her before. Pretty little thing. Cute. Said she was seventeen, but I can’t believe that. I step out of the way to let her through, but she just sits there looking at me. You’d never guess what she said.”

  Actually, I had a pretty terrible guess, but I kept it to myself.

  “She says, ‘Mr. Hall, I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. I told my parents all along, but they wanted to sue. And the lawyer, he wanted to. We was all drinking and racing and none of this is your fault. I knew you’d be worrying about it, so I just wanted you to know.’ ”

  “Pretty nice,” I said.

  He nodded. “Looked about fifteen, not seventeen,” he said, as if the question of her age were important somehow. “Cute, too.”

  He sank back down into the dilapidated sofa, ran his hands through his hair. “And the funny part is that I don’t think I’d given her two thoughts until right then. That’s the funny part.”

  It was a terrible story, and I could tell it was giving him a terrible time. As it should have, probably. What I couldn’t figure out was the introductory moral he’d prefaced it with—that some people were born lucky. I thought about it all the way home and couldn’t decide whether I’d ever met anybody who was truly lucky. The person who came closest, the more I thought about it, was me.

  40

  And so I prepared to leave Mohawk again.

  Mike took it hardest. It was tough to find a bartender who didn’t either steal or give it away. My mother, on the other hand, seemed almost grateful. The fiction of my anthropological research was wearing thin. She wanted to believe me, but sometime during the summer the nature of our relationship had changed, and I’d cut back on the number of lies I told her. In spite of ourselves we’d had an honest moment or two, and they’d managed to spoil our former innocence. Often I’d catch her looking at me strangely, with equal shares disappointment and sympathy. Like most parents, it had been her goal to spare me, and like most children, I’d been determined not to be spared. Life, in these matters, almost always sides with youth. And so my mother and I had for the first time in our lives arrived at a quiet understanding.

  The timing was just right, too. Because the evening I got off my last shift at Mike’s Place, I met F. William Peterson, who’d been out of town all week on mysterious personal business, on the back stairs that led down from my mother’s flat. He was consulting his watch as his heavy legs churned downward, and he reminded me of the rabbit in Alice. He didn’t notice me until we nearly collided on the landing.

  “Ned!” he said. “Wish me luck!”

  “Good luck, Will,” I said.

  “Thanks.” And then he was gone.

  Upstairs, my mother sat on the sofa, surrounded by brochures. “San Diego!” one said. “Port O’ The Sun!” proclaimed another. She was bent forward, staring at them, as if unsure she was permitted to touch. The glossy brochure that pictured Balboa Island was the one that occupied her direct attention. It was all blue sky and sea and orderly rows of small, well-kept cottages, their window sills decorated with bright plant boxes. F. William Peterson, it turned out, had just inherited one of them.

  I could see in my mother’s eyes that she considered this outrageous fortune another of life’s cruelties. As a young telephone operator she had dreamed of places where winter wasn’t capitalized. Phoenix, Arizona. Santa Fe, New Mexico. San Diego, California. Here was a wish from another lifetime, granted twenty-five years too late, as if God were in a place so distant that it took almost forever for wishes to travel there, like pale starlight from a distant galaxy, eons old and all worn out even as we look at it.

  I did not see Tria again. I called once to say goodbye, but her mother answered and said she wasn’t there in a tone of voice that reminded me of the one she’d used a decade earlier when, on Jack Ward’s advice, I’d called his lovely daughter from the Mohawk Grill. I didn’t blame the old woman. For all I knew, she was acting on Tria’s instructions. Either that or she’d finally read what I’d done to her father’s book.

  The day before I planned to leave, I drove around the block that contained the post office until Claude came out. What I had in mind was a staged chance meeting and a quick goodbye. It was a crummy way to handle things, but I wasn’t up to another pizza in the steamy Schwartz flat. I thought I’d seen his wife Lisa once on the street, but I wasn’t sure, since half the hopeless pregnant girls in Mohawk looked just like her.

  When Claude finally lumbered down the marble steps at ten after five, I was just about to toot the horn when he looked up. I waved, thinking he’d seen me, but what had caught his attention was an old rusted-out Thunderbird that had passed just as I pulled over to the curb. Claude stood there on the steps, the stream of people leaving the building parting around him, like a rock in the middle of a stream. The T-Bird had stopped at the traffic light that dangled from a cable at the Four Corners intersection, and Claude watched until green released the line of cars. Only then was the spell broken.

  He walked right past my father’s convertible t
hen, and I never did toot. In fact, I looked the other way, until it was safe to pull back into traffic. Out in the stream, I checked my rear view, but Claude had disappeared.

  “Your mother all bent out of shape?” my father wanted to know when I’d tossed my duffel bag into the trunk and we were headed out of town. She and I had said our goodbyes upstairs in the kitchen. When the convertible pulled into the drive, she decided against coming down.

  “No,” I told him, settling deep into the convertible’s front seat. “She thinks you’re taking me directly to the airport though, so don’t say anything if you see her.”

  “Why would I see her?” He crushed out what remained of his cigarette with what remained of his thumb, the stub crusted over and blackened just like the tip had been. He deposited the lifeless butt in the full ashtray. “I haven’t seen her three times in the last ten years. I’m gonna see her tomorrow, right?”

  It was true. They wouldn’t run into each other soon. And in a few months she and F. William Peterson would be gone from Mohawk for good. I’d promised both of them I wouldn’t say anything to my father, a promise I now considered breaking. He seemed in the midst of an uncharacteristically reasonable phase. There was no telling how much longer that would last, and it would have been nice to elicit from him a promise not to torment them, as he might decide to do if he found out from Wussy or somebody else that they were planning on slipping out of town. I decided to keep mum though. Benevolent intentions could backfire. Especially around Sam Hall, who didn’t always recognize them.