The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “Like hell you don’t,” he said. “And you’ll need more than a candy-ass lawyer and a cheap lock to keep me out of my own house.” By way of punctuation, he put his shoulder into the door, which buckled but did not give.

  “This is my father’s house, Sam Hall. You never had anything and you never will.”

  “If you aren’t going to open that door,” he warned, “you’d better stand back out of the way.”

  My mother did as she was told, but just then a police cruiser pulled up and my father vaulted the porch railing and headed off through the deep snow in back of the house. One of the cops gave chase while the other circled the block in the car, cutting off my father’s escape routes. It must have been quite a spectacle, the one cop chasing, until he was tuckered out, yelling, “We know who you are!” and my father shouting over his shoulder, “So what?” He knew nobody was going to shoot him for what he’d done (what had he done, now that he thought about it?). A man certainly had the right to enter his own house and shout at his own wife, which was exactly what she’d keep being until he decided to divorce her.

  It must have looked like a game of tag. All the neighbors came out on their back porches and watched, cheering my father, who dodged and veered expertly beyond the outstretched arms of the pursuing cops, for within minutes, the backyards of our block were lousy with uniformed men who finally succeeded in forming a wide ring and then shrinking it, the neighbors’ boos at this unfair tactic ringing in their ears. My mother watched from the back porch as the tough, wet, angry cops closed in on my father. She pretty much decided right there against the divorce idea.

  It dawned on her much later that the best way of ensuring my father’s absence was to demand he shoulder his share of the burden of raising his son. But until then, life was rich in our neighborhood. When he got out of jail, my father would make a beeline for my mother’s house (she’d had his things put in storage and changed the locks, which to her mind pretty much settled the matter of ownership), where he’d be arrested again for disturbing the peace. His visits to the Mohawk County jail got progressively longer, and so each time he got out he was madder than before. Finally, one of his buddies on the Mohawk P.D. took him aside and told him to stay the hell away from Third Avenue, because the judge was all through fooling around. Next time he was run in, he’d be in the slam a good long while. Since that was the way things stood, my father promised he’d be a good boy and go home, wherever that might be. Since one place was as good as another, he rented a room across from the police station so they’d know right where to find him. He borrowed some money and got a couple things out of storage and set them in the middle of the rented room. Then he went out again.

  He started drinking around three in the afternoon and by dinnertime found a poker game, a good one, as luck would have it, with all good guys and no problems. Except that by ten my father had lost what he had on him and had to leave the game in search of a soft touch. That time of night, finding somebody with a spare hundred on him was no breeze, even though everybody knew Sam Hall was good for it. He hit a couple of likely spots, then started on the unlikely ones. He got some drinks bought for him, sort of consolation, by people who wouldn’t or couldn’t loan him serious cash. Midnight found him in the bar of The Elms, a classy restaurant on the outskirts of town, where he tried to put the touch on Jimmy Albanese, and who should walk in but F. William Peterson, and on his arm a good-looking young woman who happened not to be his wife, but was surely someone’s. The lawyer took her to a dark, corner booth and they disappeared into its shadows. When the cocktail waitress came back to the bar with their order, my father said he’d cover the round and would she tell his friends “Up the Irish.” When F. William Peterson looked over and saw my grinning father with his glass raised, the blood drained from his face. He recognized his former assailant from the diner, of course, and had in fact been on the lookout for him, especially in parking lots, though lately he had relaxed his vigilance somewhat after my mother informed him of her decision to drop divorce proceedings, a decision he went on record as opposing on general principle and because it meant he’d taken a horrible beating for nothing. Had she bothered to inform her husband that she had dropped the suit? the lawyer wondered. Probably not, or what the hell would Sam Hall be doing at The Elms? It would be just like her not to tell him, and now he’d have to think of a way to avoid another beating, this time in a public place. A public place he wasn’t supposed to be, in the company of a woman whose husband worked the night shift. The good news was that the bar was still pretty crowded, and he doubted Sam Hall would assault him until the place cleared out a little. He and the young woman could make a run for the parking lot, but he doubted they’d make it and he’d have to explain to the woman why they were running, and this was hardly the image of himself that he chose to cultivate. Probably the best thing, F. William Peterson concluded, would be to determine the man’s intentions and try to talk him out of them. So he got up, excused himself, and went over to where my father sat talking to Jimmy Albanese.

  “You understand,” he said to my father, “that by sitting on that stool, you are violating the peace bond sworn against you, an offense for which you could be incarcerated?”

  My father looked over at Jimmy Albanese, who happened to be the next best thing to a lawyer, having failed the New York bar exam on three separate occasions.

  “He’s full of shit,” was the honorable Jimmy’s expert assessment. “You come in first. He’s harassing your ass.”

  “I tell you what,” my father said. “You let me take a hundred right now, and I forget the whole thing. You get the hundred back on Wednesday. Friday the latest.”

  It was a strange request, but F. William Peterson was tempted because he was very afraid of my father, who he was now convinced was certifiable. Unfortunately, he was a little short. “I can let you have fifty …”

  My father frowned. “Fifty.”

  The lawyer showed him his wallet, which contained fifty-seven dollars.

  “All right,” my father said reluctantly, pocketing the money. It was better than nothing, and it was easier to touch somebody else for the other half a hundred. And besides, he’d just had an idea. “I guess that makes us even. Thanks.”

  He was in a hurry, but there was a telephone booth outside The Elms and my father could feel that his luck was changing. Everything was beginning to have that falling-into-place feeling. Before driving to my mother’s, he called Mrs. F. William Peterson. Yes, she knew right where The Elms was located. And yes, if she hurried she supposed she could meet her husband there in fifteen minutes.

  Now they were even.

  By the time he got to Third Avenue it was late and the house was dark, but he managed to raise my mother. “Don’t call the cops,” he said urgently when he heard stirring inside.

  My mother suspected a trick and raised the shade and window tentatively.

  “Let me take fifty till tomorrow,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Fifty. I’ll pay you back tomorrow and after that I’ll stay clear of here.”

  “Will you give me a divorce?”

  “No,” he said. “But I won’t bother you anymore. That’s the deal.”

  My mother knew him and knew she had him. “We have a son to raise,” she said. “I can’t do it alone. You’ll have to give me fifty a month.”

  He thought about it. “Okay,” he said finally. “Sure.”

  With matters settled thus satisfactorily out of court, my mother gave him the money and considered herself fortunate, which she was. She would never collect a dime of the informal, modest alimony settlement, but then she didn’t expect to. The important thing was that she’d gotten my father to agree to it in a moment of weakness, and he’d feel guilty about not keeping his word, and he’d stay a suitable distance rather than give her the opportunity to bring the matter up. After a year or so, the debt would be considerable and he would be alert to chance meetings on the street and, in effect, she would
have her divorce. She slept soundly that night, knowing the burden she had placed on him. As it turned out, her strategy worked better than she could have hoped, because in the middle of June she ran into F. William Peterson, who informed her that Sam Hall had blown town. The lawyer also wanted to know if she’d like to go out with him sometime, what with Mrs. Peterson divorcing him and all.

  Mohawk didn’t see my father again for nearly six years, and my mother never got over what you could buy with fifty dollars, invested wisely.

  2

  Even as a child, I never had much use for conventional honesty. I can’t remember my first lie, but I do recall the first one I was caught at. Many years later when I was at the university, I confessed it to a young woman I was infatuated with, and she used me for a case study in her psych class, in return for which I got to use her for nonacademic advantage. Here’s the story I told her. The true story, more or less, of my first imaginative untruth.

  I was a first grader in McKinley Elementary School (kindergarten was optional and we hadn’t opted), and word had gotten around among the other children that my father did not live with my mother and me, an unusual circumstance in 1953 and one which made me the center of attention that September, the Mohawk Fair being over, and no real freaks (like the Heroin Monster: “See her, you’ll want to kill her!”) to gawk at for another year. My mother instructed me to say only that it was nobody’s business where my father lived, which suggests how little she understood children if she thought such a lame response would have any effect other than the inflaming of their natural, arrogant curiosity. Happily, I arrived at a more sensible solution to my problem. I informed everyone that my father was dead, and the beneficial effect of this intelligence I felt immediately. I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself.

  One day, not long after I began telling this lie, however, my teacher, Miss Holiday, took me by the hand and led me outside while the other children, obediently curled up on mats, had been instructed to nap. There at the curb was a lone, dirty white convertible. Inside was a man, and when he leaned across the front seat to open the passenger-side door, my heart did something funny and I stopped right where I was, Miss Holiday pressing up against me from behind. The man in the car had a gray chin, and the fingers that first encircled the steering wheel, then came toward me to release the door lock, were black and calloused. A cigarette dangled carelessly from the man’s lips, and bobbed when he spoke. “Thanks, young lady,” my father said.

  Miss Holiday wasn’t pressing against me anymore. Maybe she too was looking at his black fingers. “I don’t know about this,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

  “Nah,” my father said, and perhaps his failure to elaborate why not was just the right thing, because she suddenly nudged me into the car and scurried back up the walk.

  “Well?” said my father. I’ve often wondered whether he was as sure that I was his son as I was that he was my father. There was little enough physical resemblance at that stage. My hair was blond and curly, his wiry and black and bushy. Did he think that maybe the fool of a young woman had grabbed the wrong kid, or did he feel something when he saw me that said this is the one? “You know who I am?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you talk?”

  I nodded again, feeling my eyes fill.

  “Who am I?”

  I couldn’t force anything out, couldn’t look at him, except for the black thumb and finger which pressed the life out of the burning cigarette and deposited the stub in the full ashtray.

  “All right,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “Ned,” I gulped.

  “Ned Who?”

  “Ned Hall.”

  “Right. You know where the name Hall came from?”

  I shook my head. He was lighting another cigarette, and when he had done it, he tossed the still burning match into an ashtray, the flame inching down the cardboard stem, leaving it as black as my father’s thumb and forefinger.

  “Your mother tell you to say I was dead?”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  I began to cry, because I wasn’t lying.

  “She’ll wish she hadn’t,” he said. “You can bet your ass.”

  He sat and smoked and couldn’t think of anything else to ask me. “You want to go back to school or do you want some ice cream at the dairy?”

  I reached for the door handle, which I couldn’t get to move. The black fingers came over and did it. By the time I got back inside, I was shaking so badly that Miss Holiday took me to see the nurse, who examined me, and finding a low-grade fever decided to drive me home. As we turned the corner onto my street, a white convertible fishtailed away from the curb and away up the hill, just as a police car appeared at the rise coming in the opposite direction. Several neighbors were out on their porches and pointed the way of the fleeing convertible, and the patrol car did a clumsy, two-stage U-turn.

  “This means war,” my mother said when she finally got calmed down. Her eyes were glowing like the tip of my father’s cigarette.

  War it was.

  My mother was game, at least in the beginning. Every time he turned up—he averaged twice a week—she called the cops. For my father’s part, it was a guerrilla war, hit and run, in and out. His favorite time was three in the morning below my mother’s window, drunk often as not, and ready to kick up a hell of a fuss before vanishing into the night thirty seconds before the cops pulled up. He had a drunk’s radar where cops were concerned. One night during the second week of his marauding, a policeman was stationed around back after dark, so my father phoned instead of putting in a personal appearance. “How long is that fat cop planning to squat in the bushes back there?” he asked my mother. “You better draw your blinds, I know that son of a bitch.” In fact, he knew them all, and that was the problem. Every time a policeman was assigned to us, my father knew about it. Usually, he knew which one.

  Nobody seemed able to find out where he was living, though rumor had it that he was working road construction down the line in Albany. His nocturnal visits continued all summer, and by the end of August my mother was done in. At first he just accused her of instructing me to tell everybody he was dead, but he had other gripes too. He’d had a good look at me in the car that day, and he didn’t like the way I was turning out. In his opinion she was turning me into a little pussy. And speaking of pussy, he heard she’d been seen around town.

  This last accusation was beyond everything. In the six years he’d been gone, my mother might as well have been a nun. She could count the dates she’d had on one hand, she said. “That’s not the point,” he said. His long absence did not strike him as a mitigating circumstance, any more than did their mutual lack of tender feeling for each other. “You’re my wife,” he said. “And as long as you are, stay the hell home where you belong.”

  As I look back on this period in our troubled lives, what astonishes me is how little the trouble touched me. My father’s nocturnal raids seldom woke me fully, and the next morning I was only vaguely aware that something had happened during the night. On such mornings my mother always questioned me about how I’d slept, and when I said fine, her expression was equal parts relief and astonishment that it was possible for anybody to sleep through what invariably woke the neighbors. Probably I willed myself to sleep through those episodes, too afraid to wake up. I remember that summer as a nervous time. I was always on the lookout for the white convertible and under explicit instructions to run inside and tell my mother if it appeared.

  That year must have been a lonely one for my mother, who had to work all day at the phone company, then come home and endure the horror of being awakened in the middle of the night, sometimes out of sheer anticipation. She had no one to share her burdens with, your average six-year-old being an imperfect confidant. To make matters worse, she had scruples about the way she dealt with my father and even about the way she portrayed him to me. “No, he isn’t a bad man,” she responded to my surprise questio
n one day. “He wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt you. He’s just careless. He wouldn’t look out for you the way I do.”

  I thought about him a lot that winter, though the cold weather and deep snow discouraged him from beneath my mother’s bedroom window. The few minutes I’d spent with him in the dirty white convertible had somehow changed everything, not that I could have explained how or why. It was as if I suddenly understood intuitively nameless things I hadn’t missed before becoming aware of them. I kept seeing his black thumb and forefinger snuffing out the red cigarette tip, a gesture I practiced with candy cigarettes until my mother caught me at it and wanted to know what I was doing. I knew better than to explain.

  It wasn’t that I loved him, of course. But when I thought about my father, my heart did that same funny thing it had done that afternoon he leaned across the front seat of the car and threw open the passenger-side door.

  In the yard behind our house was a maple that had been planted by my grandfather before the war. It was a small boy’s dream. I lived to climb it. Its trunk was too thick to shinny up, but a makeshift ladder of two-by-four chunks had been nailed into it, and these brought the climber as far as the crotch, about six feet up, where the tree divided, unequally, the dwarf side rising about halfway up the house, the healthy dominant side to a much higher altitude.

  I was forbidden to climb the tree after the day my mother came out onto the back porch, called my name, and my voice drifted down to her from second story level, at the very top of the tree’s dwarf side. I swung down from branch to branch to show off my dexterity. My mother wasn’t impressed. “If I ever catch you in that tree again …” she said. She either liked unfinished sentences or couldn’t think of how to finish them, and I resented her unwillingness to spell out consequences. It was impossible to weigh alternatives without them. But I was an obedient boy and did as I was told whenever she was around.

  After school got out at 3:30, my mother’s cousin—Aunt Rose, I called her—looked after me until quarter of five when my mother got home from the phone company. Aunt Rose’s little house was around the corner and up the street from where we lived, halfway between my school and home. She fed me macaroons and we laughed immoderately at Popeye the Sailor. Aunt Rose also liked professional wrestling on Saturday afternoons, though her face got red with moral indignation at what some of the contestants got away with and how blind the referees were. Weekdays, after Olive Oyl was rescued, I headed home to await my mother on the front porch. Ours was probably the only house in Mohawk that was always locked. The only one that needed to be, my mother said. I knew why, though I wasn’t supposed to. It was to keep my father out.