The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  The fifteen minutes between 4:30 and 4:45 was my time in the tree. Each day I dared a little higher, the slender upper branches bending beneath my seven-year-old weight. I was convinced that if I could make it to the top of the tree, I would be able to look out over the roof of my grandfather’s house, beyond Third Avenue, across all of Mohawk. I quickly mastered the dwarf side, but I was afraid to try the other. The branch I needed in order to begin was just beyond my reach, even when I stood on tiptoe in the crotch below. Although no great leap was necessary, my knees always got weak and I was afraid. If I failed to grab hold of the limb, I would fall all the way to the ground.

  Day after day I stood sorrowfully in the crotch, staring into the center of the tree, immobile, full of self-hate and terrible yearning, until my mental clock informed me that my mother’s ride would deposit her on the terrace any minute. The ground felt soft as a pillow when I swung down, and I knew I was a coward.

  One afternoon, as I stood there, gazing up into that dark green and speckled blue height, I was suddenly aware that I was being watched, and when I turned, he stood there on the back porch, leaning forward with his arms on the railing. I could tell he’d been there for some time, and I was even more ashamed than other days when there were no witnesses. I knew when I saw him standing there that I had never intended to jump.

  “Well?” he said.

  And that one word was all it took. I don’t remember jumping. Suddenly, I just had a hold of the limb with both hands, then had a knee over, then with a heave, I was up. The rest of the way would be easy, I knew, and I didn’t care about it. I could do it any day.

  “You better come down,” my father said. “Your mother catches you up there, she’ll skin us both.”

  Even as he spoke, we heard a car pull up out front. I swung down lickety-split.

  “You figure you can keep a secret?” he said.

  When I said sure, he nimbly vaulted the porch railing and landed next to me, so close we could have touched. Then he was gone.

  3

  A week later he kidnapped me.

  I had left Aunt Rose’s and was on my way home when I saw the white convertible. It was coming toward me up the other side of the street, traveling fast. I didn’t think it would stop, but it did. At the last moment it swerved across the street to my side and came to a rocking halt, one wheel over the curb.

  “What’s the matter?” my father wanted to know. I must have looked like something was the matter. He had a gray chin again and his hair looked crazy until he ran his black fingers through it, which helped only a little.

  I said nothing was the matter.

  “You want to go for a ride?”

  I figured he must mean to the dairy for ice cream.

  “Come here,” he said.

  I started around the car to the passenger side.

  “Here,” he repeated. “You know what ‘here’ means?”

  Actually, I don’t think I did. At least I couldn’t figure out what good it would do me to walk over and stand next to him outside the car. I found out though, because suddenly he had me under the arms, and then I was high in the air, above the convertible’s windshield, where I rotated 180 degrees and plopped into the seat beside him. My teeth clicked audibly, but other than that it was a smooth landing.

  He put the convertible in gear and we thumped down off the curb and up the street past Aunt Rose’s in the opposite direction from the dairy. I figured he’d turn around when we got to the intersection, but he didn’t. We just kept on going, straight out of Mohawk. My father’s hair was wild again, and mine was too, I could feel it.

  The car smelled funny. My father didn’t seem aware of it until finally he sniffed and said, “Ah, shit,” and pulled over so that he was half on the road and half on the shoulder. First he flung up the hood, then the trunk. With the hood up, the funny burning smell was even worse. My father got two yellow cans out of the trunk and punched holes in them. Then he unscrewed a cap on the engine and poured in the contents of the two cans. In the gap between the dash and the hood I could see his black fingers working. I thought about my mother, who would be just about putting her key in the front door lock and wondering how come I wasn’t on the front porch to greet her. I started to send her a telepathic thought, “I’m with my father,” until I remembered that the message wouldn’t exactly comfort her should she receive it.

  My father slammed the hood and trunk and got back in the car.

  “Ever see one of these?” He dropped something small and heavy in my lap. A jackknife, it looked like. I knew my mother wouldn’t want me to touch it. “Open it,” my father said.

  I did. Every time I opened something, there was something else to open. There were two knives, a large one and a small one, the can opener I’d seen him use, a pair of tiny scissors you could actually work, assuming you had something that tiny that needed scissoring, a thing you could use to clean your nails with and a file. There were other features too, but I didn’t know what they were for. With all its arms opened up, the gadget looked like a lopsided spider.

  “Don’t lose it,” he said.

  We were pretty well out in the country now and when he pulled into a long dirt driveway, I was sure he just meant to turn around. Instead, he followed the road on through a clump of trees to a small, rusty trailer. A big, dark-skinned man in a shapeless hat was seated on a broken concrete block. I was immediately interested in the hat, which was full of shiny metallic objects that reflected the sun. He stood when my father jerked the car to a stop, crushed stone rattling off the trailer.

  “Well?” my father said.

  The man consulted his watch. “Hour late,” he said. “Not bad for Sam Hall. Practically on time. Who’s this?”

  “My son. We’ll teach him how to fish.”

  “Who’ll teach you?” the man said. “Howdy, Sam’s Kid.”

  He offered a big, dark-skinned hand.

  “Go ahead and shake his ugly paw,” my father said.

  I did, and then the man gathered up the gear that was resting up against the trailer. “You want to open this trunk, or should I just rip it off the hinges?” he said when my father made no move to get out and help.

  “Kind of ornery, ain’t he,” my father said confidentially, tossing the keys over his shoulder.

  “Hey, kid,” the man said. “How’d you like to ride in the back?”

  “Tell him to kiss your ass,” my father advised. “You got enough gear for three?”

  The man reluctantly got in the back. “Enough for me and the kid anyways. Don’t know about you. Can he talk or what?”

  My father swatted me. “Say hello to Wussy. He’s half colored, half white, and all mixed up.”

  Wussy leaned forward so he could see into the front seat. “He ain’t exactly dressed for this.” I was wearing a thin t-shirt, shorts, sneakers. “Course, you aren’t either. You planning to attend a dance in those shoes?”

  “I didn’t have time to change,” my father shrugged.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  My father started to answer, then looked at me. “Someplace.”

  “Oh,” the man called Wussy said. “I been there. Hey, Sam’s Kid, you know what a straight flush is?”

  I shook my head.

  “His name is Ned.”

  “Ned?”

  My father nodded. “I wasn’t consulted.”

  “How come?”

  “I wasn’t around might have had something to do with it.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Someplace,” my father said. “Which reminds me.”

  We were speeding along out in the country and there was a small store up ahead. We pulled in next to the telephone booth. My father closed the door behind him, but I could still hear part of the conversation. My father said she could kiss his ass.

  When he got back in the car, my father looked at me and shook his head as if he thought maybe I’d done something. “Don’t lose that,” he said. I was still fingering the s
pider gadget.

  “As long as we’re stopped,” Wussy said, “what do you say we put the top up?”

  “What for?” my father said.

  Wussy tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up. The sun had disappeared behind dark clouds, and the air had gone cool.

  “Your ass,” my father said, jerking the car back onto the highway.

  Ten minutes later the skies opened.

  “Your old man is a rockhead,” Wussy observed after they finally got the top up. It had stuck at first and we were all soaked. “No wonder your mother don’t want nothing to do with him.”

  It was nearly dark when we got to the cabin. We had to leave the convertible at the end of the dirt road and hike in the last mile, the sun winking at us low in the trees. We followed the river, more or less, though there were times when it veered off to the left and disappeared. Then after a while we would hear it again and there it would be. Wussy—it turned out that his name was Norm—led the way, carrying the rods and most of the tackle, then me, then my father, complaining every step. His black dress shoes got ruined right off, which pleased Wussy, and the mosquitoes ate us. My father wanted to know who would build a cabin way the hell and gone off in the woods. It seemed to him that anybody crazy enough to go to all that trouble might better have gone to a little more and poured a sidewalk, at least, so you could get to it. Wussy didn’t say anything, but every now and then he’d hold on to a wet branch and then let go so that it whistled over the top of my head and caught my father in the chin with a thwap, after which Wussy would say, “Careful.”

  I was all right for a while, but then the woods began to get dark and I felt tired and scared. When something we disturbed scurried off underfoot and into the bushes, I got to thinking about home and my tree and my mother, who had no idea where I was. It occurred to me that if I let myself get lost, nobody would ever find me, and the more I thought about it, the closer I stuck to Wussy, ready to duck whenever he sent a branch whistling over my head.

  “I hope you didn’t bring me all the way out here to roll me, Wuss,” my father said. “I should have mentioned I don’t have any money.”

  “I want those shiny black shoes.”

  “You would, you black bastard.”

  “Nice talk, in front of the kid.” A branch caught my father in the chops.

  “What color is he, bud?” my father poked me in the back.

  I was embarrassed. My mother had told me about Negroes and that it wasn’t nice to accuse them of it. Wussy’s skin was the color of coffee, at least the way my mother drank it, with cream and sugar. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” my father said. “He’s none too sure either.”

  And then suddenly we were out of the trees and there was the cabin, the river gurgling about forty yards down the slope.

  Wussy tossed all the gear inside and started a fire in a circle of rocks a few feet from the ramshackle porch. When it got going good, he brought out a big iron grate to put over it. With the sun down, it had gotten cool and the fire felt good. My father fidgeted nearby until Wussy told him he could collect some dry sticks if he felt like it. “You could have brought a pair of long pants and a jacket for him at least,” he said.

  “Didn’t have a chance,” my father said.

  “Look at him,” Wussy said critically. “Knees all scraped up …”

  “How the hell did I know we were going to blaze a trail?” my father said. “You cold?”

  “No,” I lied.

  Wussy snorted. “I think I saw blankets inside.”

  My father went to fetch them. “Your old man’s a rockhead,” Wussy observed again. “Otherwise, he’s all right.”

  He didn’t seem to need me to agree, so I didn’t say anything. He opened three cans of chili with beans into a black skillet and set it on top of the grate. Then he chopped up two yellow onions and added them. You couldn’t see much except the dark woods and the outline of the cabin. We heard my father banging into things and cursing inside. After a few minutes the chili began to form craters which swelled, then exploded. “Man-color,” Wussy said. “That’s what I am.”

  My father finally came back with a couple rough blankets. He draped one over me and threw the other around his own shoulders.

  “No thanks,” Wussy said. “I don’t need one.”

  “Good,” my father said.

  “And you don’t need any of this chili,” Wussy said, winking at me. “Me and you will have to eat it all, Sam’s Kid.”

  My father squatted down and inspected the sputtering chili. “I hate like hell to tell you what it looks like.”

  It looked all right to me and it smelled better than I knew food could smell. It was way past my normal dinner time and I was hungry. Wussy ladled a good big portion onto a plate and handed it to me. Then he loaded about twice as much onto a plate for himself.

  “What the hell,” my father said.

  “What the hell is right,” Wussy said. “What the hell, eh Sam’s Kid?”

  My father got up and went back into the cabin for another blanket. When he returned, Wussy said no thanks, he was doing fine, but didn’t my father want any chili? “You better get going,” he advised. “Me and the kid are ready for seconds.”

  We weren’t, exactly, but when he finished giving my father a pretty small portion, he ladled more onto my plate and the rest of the skillet onto his own.

  “I bet there’s a lot of shallow graves out here in the woods,” my father speculated, pretending not to notice there was no more chili whether he hurried up or not. “You suppose anybody would miss you if you didn’t come home tomorrow?”

  “Women, mostly,” Wussy said. “I feel pretty safe though. Mostly I worry about you. Anything happened to me, you’d starve before you ever located that worthless oil guzzler of yours.”

  “Your ass.”

  When I couldn’t eat any more, I gave the rest of my chili to my father, who looked like he was thinking of licking the hot skillet. “The kid’s all right,” Wussy said. “I don’t care who his old man is.”

  It was so black out now that we couldn’t even see the cabin, just a thousand stars and each other’s faces in the dying fire.

  Wussy blew the loudest fart I’d ever heard. “What color’s my skin?” he said, as if he hadn’t done anything at all.

  I had been almost asleep, until the fart. “Man-color,” I said, wide awake again.

  “There you go,” he said.

  I woke with the sun in my eyes next morning. There were no curtains on the cabin’s high windows. I was still dressed from the night before. My legs, all scratched from the long walk through the woods, felt heavy and a little unsteady when I stood up. I looked around for a bathroom, but there wasn’t any.

  My father and his friend Wussy were face down on the other two bunks. My father’s arms were coffee-colored, like Wussy’s, but his legs and back were fish-white. Wussy had taken the trouble to crawl under the covers, but my father lay on top. The cabin had been warm the night before, but it was chilly now, though my father didn’t seem aware of it. I was cold, and it made me really wish there was a bathroom. In the center of the small table was an empty bottle and a deck of cards fanned face up. They’d kept score in long uneven columns labeled N and S on a brown paper bag. The S columns were the longer ones, and the number 85 was circled at the top of the bag with a dollar sign in front of it. I had awakened several times during the night when one of them yelled “Gin!” or “You son of a bitch!” but I was too exhausted to stay awake. I watched the two sleepers for a while, but neither man stirred, so I went outside.

  The iron skillet, alive with bright green flies, still sat on the grate. There were so many flies, and they were so furious that their bodies pinged against the metal like small pebbles. They would buzz frantically in the hardened chili for a few seconds, then do wide arcs above the skillet before diving back again. I watched with interest for a while and then went down to the river. We were so far upstream that it w
asn’t very deep in most spots, a river in name only. Rocks jutted up above the surface of the water and it looked like you’d be able to jump from one to the next all the way to the opposite bank. I tried it, but only got partway, because when you got out toward the middle, the rocks weren’t as close together as they’d looked from the bank. One solid-looking flat rock tipped under my weight and I had to plunge one sneakered foot deep into the cool current to keep from falling in. The water ran so fast that the shoe was nearly sucked off, and I was scared enough to head back to shore on a squishy sneaker, aware that if my mother had been there, she’d have thrown a fit about my getting it wet. I doubted my father and Wussy would even notice. I found a comfortable rock on the bank and had another look at my father’s knife gadget, trying to pretend I didn’t have to go to the bathroom. Having the river right there made the necessity to pee hard to ignore. I wasn’t sure I could hold it all day.

  After a while the door of the cabin opened and Wussy appeared in his undershorts. “Hello, Sam’s Kid,” he said. He tiptoed over to the spot where he’d built the fire, yanked himself out of his shorts and watered the bushes for a very long time. I could hear him above the sound of the river.

  When he saw me watching, he said, “Gotta go, Sam’s Kid?”

  I shook my head. I could hold out a while longer, and I wanted it to seem like my own idea when I went. I was very relieved to learn that peeing in the weeds was permissible, though it was one more thing I didn’t think I’d mention to my mother.