The Risk Pool

  I turned the key in the ignition and the car’s exhaust spit very nearly solid matter. When I started to back down the drive, Drew Littler rapped on the hood. “You know what happened back then, don’t you,” he said.

  “Know what?” I said.

  I’d become a far better liar since that day twenty years ago when I’d told my first-grade classmates how come my father wasn’t around. Drew Littler couldn’t have told from my face. I’ve been over it and over it, and that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.

  I put in a quart of oil before leaving town, but my father’s convertible gave a dreadful shudder and died right on the county line about ten miles out of Mohawk. The good news was I was at the crest of a long gradual hill that wound all the way down to the river, so I put the car in neutral and let it coast the last mile right into a gas station at the foot of the hill. The convertible came to rest right next to a phone booth, but I didn’t use it. I’d delayed my getaway too long already. I signed the title back over to my father, stuffed it in the glove box, and locked the car. A southbound Trailways bus was parked a block and a half down the street and I got on. That night I called Mike’s Place from New York and left a message.

  It was almost three months later, a couple days after Thanksgiving, when the telephone rang and I recognized my father’s voice.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well hello,” I said.

  “How come you’re never home when I call?”

  I told him I was working every minute to pay for the dark, dreadful apartment I’d rented and the few sticks of ratty furniture I had to keep me company.

  “You’re all straightened around though?”

  I said I was all straightened around.

  “Want to run up for a day or two?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Christmas is coming …”

  “Have to be tomorrow to do any good,” he said. Then he explained why. “Eileen will understand if you can’t.”

  Drew Littler’s funeral was going to be in the afternoon. They’d been trying to reach me and my father had gone over to my mother’s, hoping she’d know my number. “How the hell did I know she’s gone to San Diego of all fucking places?” he said. And for the next ten minutes he regaled me with the difficulties he’d had tracking me down through F. William Peterson’s old law firm, how they wouldn’t give him the California number, how he’d had to have Wussy find out, how somebody ought to have his ass kicked for keeping secrets, how my mother hadn’t wanted to give him my number, how F. William Peterson had had to call back and leave it at Mike’s Place. “He knew he better had,” my father said, his voice rich with the memory of having shown F. William Peterson, on numerous occasions, where the bear shit in the buckwheat. “I never heard of this Balboa Island, but I bet I could find it, and I got just about enough money to get there, too.”

  A dreamy distant feeling had come over me as I listened to him talk, thoroughly sidetracked, imagining, as had always been his habit, that other people’s stories were his own, that you couldn’t understand their complete meaning unless they got filtered through his point of view. Eventually, he got back to Drew Littler. He’d been going so fast that when he hit the side of the Chevy van the impact had knocked the vehicle clear off the highway and onto its side in the ditch. Drew himself had ruptured the van’s side paneling and ended up inside. “Most of him, anyhow,” my father said. The driver of the van had had a green light and never saw the Harley enter the intersection. Eyewitnesses guessed Drew Littler had to be going a hundred. They said the Harley neither slowed nor swerved before impact.

  “So,” my father said. “You still there.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Where’s your apartment?”

  I told him.

  “I had one a couple blocks from there,” he said.

  “When?”

  “A long time ago. Right after I left your mother. And you.”

  We left it that I’d try to get home around Christmas. “Send Eileen a card if you can find one,” he said.

  I said I would.

  “She’s a good girl,” he reminded me. “Now she’s got one less headache.”

  “Jesus, Dad,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “It’s an awful thing to say.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Be honest.”

  “It really is. Honestly.”

  “If you say so,” he said. “Anyway, remember. The streets go one way, the avenues the other.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Words to live by.

  “Is Balboa Island really an island?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “She says the sun shines every day.”

  “Good,” he said. “Good for her.”

  41

  During the next decade I saw my father no more than a dozen times, this despite the fact that the buses ran from the Port Authority in Manhattan right to the cigar store on the Four Corners in downtown Mohawk in just under five hours. Twice during this period he called me from the Bronx with tickets to Yankee ball games that had come to him via a route so circuitous that it took him the first couple innings to explain. There was this guy who got them at work and who gave them to a guy who couldn’t go, who gave them to his cousin, who discovered that morning that his car wouldn’t start and who gave them to a guy my father hadn’t seen since Christ was a corporal and who he just happened to run into outside the OTB. Over the years, my father had become increasingly fascinated with the workings of chance, and was every day more convinced that luck ruled the universe and kept him un lucky. Even when things like the odd fortuitous pair of Yankee tickets dropped into his lap, he liked examining the odds of such a thing happening, and when he was all finished studying the ins and outs of this particular good fortune, he’d go back to his original thesis about being unlucky, noting that real luck would have brought him Mets tickets. When the game was over he always insisted on heading back to Mohawk. He knew how to get from the stadium to the Thruway and was convinced that if I ever got him all the way downtown where I lived, he’d never find his way back.

  “You can’t get lost,” I told him. “Just remember. The streets go one way, the avenues the other.”

  “Thanks anyhow,” he said. “My luck, I’d be just as liable to get going wrong and end up in California, where I don’t know anybody but your mother.”

  This was a hint for me to fill him in on how she was doing, whether she and F. William Peterson were still married.

  “I never liked this town, even when I lived here,” he said each time he came to the city. “It’s full of people who don’t know any better.”

  He did come all the way downtown once, about a year after the last of our meetings at Yankee Stadium. It was the week before Christmas, windy and wet and not quite cold enough to snow. I’d gotten home late and still had my overcoat on when the buzzer went off. On my way to see who it was, I ticked off half a dozen people who might be buzzing me at 7:30 on a Friday evening, and Sam Hall didn’t even make the list. There he was though, the top of his head recognizable three stories down.

  He’d been drinking at Mickey’s across the street and waiting for me to turn up. “It’s a wonder anybody ever gets drunk in this town,” he said, even before hello, when I met him on the stairs half way up. “I ordered a bottle of beer and the bartender says two-fifty. I tell him I don’t want the whole six-pack, just the one. That’s good, he says, ’cause for two-fifty you just get the one.”

  We shook hands.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” I said.

  “Visiting my son, if that’s all right.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s great. You took the bus?”

  “Drove.”

  “Where did you park?”

  “Right out front.”

  We were back in the apartment by then, so I looked down into the street. “Right there,” he pointed to the roof of a Plymouth Valiant.

  “Amazing,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t move it.” r />
  “This is all right,” he said, looking around my place. It was, in fact, the first decent apartment I’d had since coming to New York. “What’s it set you back?”

  I told him.

  He raised his eyebrows, but offered no comment. It figured, given the price of beer.

  He’d planned to stay the weekend but by lunchtime the next day he was clearly itchy to get back to Mohawk. It depressed him that Manhattan barmaids didn’t like to be teased. He didn’t think there was much point in being a waitress if you couldn’t let yourself have a little fun at least. The bartenders were just as bad. They looked at him strangely when he slid onto a bar stool and staked his claim to it with a twenty-dollar bill. His was always the only bill of any denomination on the entire length of the bar, which had been specially grooved to accommodate the tabs which were rung after each order and then arched before the patrons.

  “Not me,” my father said. “If I’m tending this bar, I gotta see green before I go near the tap. Otherwise, you got guys drinking till closing and coming up light.”

  He was sure of it, too. He’d be damned if there wasn’t at least one deadbeat at the bar even as we spoke.

  “I come in, I drink a couple of beers, I get up to go to the john, I go in, I come back, I drink another beer, I gotta go again, right? Except this time I keep right on going out the door. There’s another spot around the block does things the same dumb way. Tomorrow night I go to a different part of town. By the time I run out of bars it’s 1990 and I can start all over again.”

  He couldn’t wait to tell Roy Heinz about it when he got back home. Could I imagine that son of a bitch down here? He’d drink five hundred dollars worth of free booze in a week. A thousand probably.

  My father took his time about it, but eventually the reason for his visit came out. Eileen had married during the summer, and for six months he’d been flirting with the idea of regret.

  “Who’d she marry?” I said.

  “That’s the worst part,” he said. “She had to go and find the laziest Polack in Mohawk County, as if all she needed was another mouth to feed. I told her so, too.”

  “I’ll bet she appreciated it.”

  “You never could tell her anything,” he admitted, “so why try?”

  I shrugged.

  “So why try?” he repeated.

  I said I didn’t know. “Maybe she loves him,” I ventured. “Maybe she’s tired of being lonely.”

  In fact, he looked pretty lonely and confused himself, sitting there in a strange bar full of strange people and strange local customs that weren’t worth trying to understand. It had finally occurred to him, I think, what he never suspected when he left my mother so many years ago. That he could end up alone.

  My visits to Mohawk during this period were no more successful than my father’s visits to New York, and far less frequent. If memory serves, I made the journey upstate only twice during the decade after I left Mohawk. The timing was all wrong for the first, my father having been out of work for a while and pretty broke. I wasn’t all that flush myself, though I was working two jobs. I’d been in the city about two years then and was trying to save some money. I’d enrolled in a program in publishing at one of the city colleges for the fall, which would mean the end of one of my jobs. Something—some fucking thing, as my father would have put it—was going to have to give. I was going to have to find a cheaper, dirtier, less safe apartment, or take out a loan, or get a roommate, or something. I think that in the back of my mind I hoped that during my visit, the subject of money would come up, that I’d tell my father my plans, that he’d have some money for once and float me a loan. I’m ashamed to admit that I also remembered the loan I’d unknowingly floated him so many years before. That, I’ve concluded, is one of the worst things about not having money; it causes you to recall what people owe you, or what you imagine they owe you.

  But the subject of money never came up. We went out to dinner at The Elms the night I arrived in Mohawk. Mike had bought the place back the year before and it looked just the same as it had when my father had taken me there as a boy. I half expected a young Jack Ward to swagger in wearing a cream-colored suit, his lovely dark-haired little daughter in tow. Mike’s wife Irma was back in her old role as hostess, escorting couples into the dining room with an expression that suggested her indifference to whether the entire party dropped dead. She appeared genuinely pleased to see me though, and my father and I got the best table in the place. It had had a reserved sign on it, but she discreetly removed this and tucked it under her arm.

  “How come I don’t get this kind of treatment when I come here alone?” my father wanted to know.

  “You just answered your own question, didn’t you.” Irma glowered at him.

  “You better marry me pretty soon,” my father said. “Otherwise I’m going to stop asking and then you’ll be stuck with Mike for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m stuck with the both of you either way.”

  We ate a good dinner, and when we finished, I said, “Let me, for once.”

  No check had come and I was beginning to suspect that my father had called Mike sometime that afternoon to see if he could take care of the bill later.

  We went into the bar afterward and had a drink, which my father let me pay for. “You show the kid your elbow?” Mike asked my father.

  “Big mouth,” my father said.

  I’d noticed him rubbing it during dinner and had been on the verge of asking about it, but gotten sidetracked.

  “It’s a beauty, huh?” my father said now, as he rolled up his sleeve. Mike set one of the red goblet bar candles next to the elbow, so we could see. The grotesqueness of the injury took my breath away. The skin covering the elbow was stretched tight over the hairless, tennis-ball-sized protuberance.

  I said, “Jesus, Dad.”

  “Just water is all, the doctor says …”

  “Their doctor says. What do you expect? You think they want to pay disability?”

  It had happened in the spring. Up till then he’d been tending bar for Mike and things had been fine, except people in places like The Elms were always ordering drinks like banana daiquiris, which my father hated making, so when he had a chance to go back on the road he told Mike to hell with banana daiquiris and piña coladas and all the other asshole drinks. He’d fallen only a few feet off the form truck, but his elbow had taken the full impact. The surgeons had done what they could, pieced the shattered elbow back together, said that in a month or two, with a little luck and some physical therapy, he’d get back ninety percent use of the arm. For therapy he’d worked the other side of the bar, bending his elbow like he was told.

  “It looks worse today than when you got out of the hospital,” Mike said.

  “I know it,” my father conceded. “What do you want from me. They say I can work.”

  “Fuck ’em. Come back and work for me. I’ll put Ned on too. Weekends you can work together.”

  “What good would I be? I can’t straighten my arm past here.” My father demonstrated.

  “Right. You can’t tend bar, but you can work construction,” Mike said, shaking his head. “Your old man’s got rocks upstairs.”

  “I just happen to be tough,” my father told him. “Some guys are. Other guys are pussies. I’m not naming any names.”

  I was still working on the fact that my father had had a serious accident and an operation to boot, and hadn’t called. “Thanks for telling me about all this,” I said when Mike was gone.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “What would you have done? Come down here and held my hand while they operated?”

  “If I had to have an operation, wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “That’s different.” He grinned. “I’d explain it if I thought you were smart enough to understand.”

  He rolled his sleeve back down, with some difficulty, because the elbow was still sore and there was much more of it than the shirt was designed to accommodate.

&
nbsp; “We could try it … if you wanted to tend bar …”

  “I was planning on taking some classes in the city this fall,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Glad to hear it.”

  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected the slightest shade of disappointment in his voice, perhaps the result of my answering so quickly, as if the idea of returning to Mohawk and working with him had merited no serious consideration. But if he was disappointed, he covered it quickly, spinning around on his bar stool to offer his other hand and elbow on the bar. “Anyhow, this is the one I arm-wrestle with.”

  It was also the one that was missing part of a thumb from the earlier accident. It occurred to me then that my father was losing a subtle war of attrition.

  My more recent visit to Mohawk was about three years after the one I just related. I’d flown in to Albany on the last commuter flight on Friday night. Our plan was to catch the Travers Stakes at Saratoga the next afternoon, spend the evening catching up (it had been nearly nine months since we’d spoken on the telephone, over a year since we’d seen each other), then I’d take the bus back to the city on Sunday.

  I figured on an hour or so of quiet reading time in the airport before he arrived. My father always either lost track of the clock and left Mohawk about the same time the plane was landing, or left in plenty of time but got off at the wrong Albany exit and then claimed they moved the airport again. But this evening, to my surprise, he was right there at the gate when I got off my plane, looking as if he had secret doubts about being in the right place. Also, he was wearing glasses. But even with them I spotted him long before he picked me out of the crowd.

  “Well,” he said, when we shook. “You were on there.”

  “I said I would be.”

  I couldn’t help staring at his glasses, which were missing one arm. The other dutifully hooked one ear, providing an imperfect anchor for the lenses, which balanced precariously on the bridge of his nose.

  “I’d about given up,” he said.

  “You expected me to be in first class?”

  “Why not? You’re getting to be such a big shot down there,” he said, taking the small bag I was carrying.