The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  Finally the engine turned over. My father leaned over the backseat. “You want to ride up front with me?”

  “I’m fine right here,” Wussy said.

  “Which is how come I call you Wussy,” my father said.

  There must be something about getting shot at that changes the way a man looks at things. According to my mother and some other people who knew him before the war, my father came home from Germany a different man. That was to be expected, of course. What was surprising was that the volley my mother aimed at the white convertible marked the beginning of a long hiatus in their personal conflict instead of escalating it. I honestly doubt he was all that scared, and when I asked him about the incident years later, I think he told me the truth when he said he was less surprised by the bullets burrowing into his car than by the fact that my mother had taken their ongoing differences so seriously. That she should so puzzled him that he even questioned his behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who had faithfully awaited his return from overseas, now calmly and purposefully blasting away, without visible remorse, in the general direction of his life and property.

  They had always had a rather contentious, combative relationship, and a good fight had never before spoiled things. One night a few months after my father had returned from the war and they’d gone dancing, they were accosted by a drunk who kept insisting that my father must know this welterweight from Syracuse. “Hall,” he kept saying. “He fights under the name of Hall.” My father got a charge out of the idea. “That’s the name my wife and I fight under,” he said.

  Back then, they had enjoyed making up, and if they’d thrown things at each other, the broken pieces could always be swept off the floor later. He never bought anything without considering its possible use as a missile, and he knew that there were few purer pleasures in the world than throwing things. During the long months of his nocturnal raids, he had considered the whole thing good fun, and he looked forward to eventual, inevitable reconciliation with my mother. They were both Catholics, at least nominally, and my mother had said till death. Even her calling the police had seemed fair enough. After all, she had few weapons to fight him with, and besides, he had enjoyed eluding cops. It did not occur to him that she might really mean the things she said about him—that she considered him a menace, that she would keep their son away from him for the same reason that she would not let him play in traffic or pet rabid dogs.

  Could it be true that he was a dangerous man? He had killed men in France and Germany, but their deaths were more the result of their own stupidity or bad luck than any deadly efficiency on his part. The men who had fought beside him had never considered him careless, or at least hadn’t said they did. He had been neither cowardly nor foolhardy, just dependable. How had his wife gotten the idea he was a dangerous man?

  Still, when the first bullet slammed into his convertible, it punctuated a thought that had been gnawing at him all the way home from the river. He had not been much of a caretaker for me during the last twenty-four hours. He hadn’t intended to do such a bad job. He hadn’t thought that it would be a job. In fact, he had intended the kidnapping—an idea he thought of and acted upon in the same instant—to demonstrate that a boy needed a father. Instead, everything had turned out badly. When we were a few blocks from home, he had looked over at me and seen the unavoidable evidence of his guardianship. He had snatched a clean, happy, reasonably well-adjusted boy and was returning less than twenty-four hours later a dirty little vagabond in wet sneakers and a torn t-shirt, whose poison-ivied legs and arms were raked raw, whose eyes were nearly swollen shut with crying over the loss of a two-dollar gadget. And if all that and getting shot at weren’t enough, he had to listen to a lecture from Wussy. My father still remembered it years later.

  “You know where I found him when I looked out the window this morning?” Wussy wanted to know. “Standing on a rock in the middle of the river. You’re pretty damn lucky we weren’t bringing home a drowned corpse. I don’t blame her for shooting at you.”

  “She came closer to you than me,” my father pointed out weakly.

  “People usually do. That’s how come I live out in the country.”

  They drove the rest of the way there in silence, contemplating how different it was in a car with no windshield, dodging tiny windblown shards of glass. When they pulled up in front of the trailer, Wussy got out and unloaded the gear. “Shot one of my reels,” Wussy observed, holding it up.

  My father wasn’t interested. “What would you do?” he said.

  Wussy shrugged.

  “Maybe I should stay away from him for a while.”

  “For a while wouldn’t hurt,” Wussy said. “Until he grows up a little.”

  “Or until I do?”

  “No point waiting that long,” Wussy said. He studied the convertible from his cinderblock step. “First thing I’d do is get a new car. This one’s full of holes.”

  4

  And so he went away again.

  No one knew where. For a while my mother got phone calls from people he owed money. They wanted to know how come he disappeared, and when she told them she neither knew nor cared they only believed the last part. Some wanted to know if she felt like squaring his debts.

  In fact, my father left town so quickly and quietly that there was considerable speculation about whether he’d really left at all, especially after the story of how my mother had shot his car got around. About two weeks after his disappearance, two policemen in street clothes rang our bell and wondered if they might ask my mother some questions. There’d been talk at the phone company, so she wasn’t surprised.

  They wanted to know everything. What happened the afternoon my father’s car got shot, why she had done it, and had we seen my father since. By the time they got around to us, they’d already talked to the neighbors, and all the eyewitnesses had agreed, at least in the beginning, that just the car had been shot. But the more they were questioned, the less certain they became. Maybe my father had been shot, they conceded hopefully. Or maybe the man who had slumped down in the backseat had been. Yes, my father had driven the wounded automobile away, stopping a couple of blocks down the street to change the tire my mother had exploded, but they couldn’t be absolutely certain nobody had been hit. Sometimes people got shot and weren’t aware of it until later. Maybe my father had crawled off someplace and died. Or maybe my mother caught up with him later and finished him off.

  The policeman wanted to see the gun my mother used, unaware that it had been confiscated by the patrolman who answered the call the afternoon of the shooting. And they wanted to talk to me about the kidnapping. I told them all about the three fish I’d caught and how my father had only caught his thumb. I informed them that another man called Norm—a.k.a. Wussy—had gone with us, and described the little trailer he lived in outside of Mohawk. They must have located poor Wussy, because the next morning F. William Peterson called to say that the official investigation into my father’s disappearance had been concluded after a friend told the cops it was my father’s intention to head out west and work on the interstates. A car answering a pretty accurate description—one side full of bullet holes—had gassed up at a Thruway station near Utica and the driver had purchased a case of oil.

  “How can people think such things?” my mother said to F. William Peterson. To her mind there was a real distinction between shooting a man’s car and shooting a man. She had never given anyone reason to think she was capable of the latter.

  Even though it had quickly become clear that there was no connection between her assault on the convertible and my father’s subsequent disappearance, the resulting gossip was the beginning of serious trouble for my mother, who began to suffer acute anxiety attacks. When they got so bad she couldn’t stop shaking, the doctor prescribed librium, which calmed her way down. She mostly stared at a spot on the wall about a foot above the Victrola, and her work
at the telephone company suffered. But when it came time to renew the prescription, she decided to start attending church instead. As a girl she’d always felt serene in church, a feeling not unlike a couple libriums, without the drowsy side effects.

  Once she started going to church, she couldn’t stop. She attended Mass the way drunks went on binges. She couldn’t get enough. In church she felt safe and secure. Not even my father would dare violate its cool, dark sanctity. She took me along for company.

  Our Lady of Sorrows was white, Mission style, simple and clean, without any ornate ostentation. I loved its long side aisles and rich stained-glass windows. In the early morning, the little church, never locked, would be nearly black inside, except for the thin crease of light beneath the sacristy door. The old Monsignor, our pastor, always arrived before his parishioners. As the eastern sky lightened, the windows along one side took on color, and the church would grow warm and still, except for the creaking of an occasional pew or clicking of beads. The quiet and beauty of Our Lady of Sorrows reminded me of the woods that morning I was alone on the river before my father and Wussy woke up. More than anything I wanted to investigate the sacristy, the church’s inner recess where the old priest and altar boys clothed in rich vestments plotted the mass for the rest of us. I asked my mother what you needed to do to become an altar boy, and the question made her very happy, as if for the first time she believed that my father had really gone out west and the two of us were safe.

  In due course I was enrolled in catechism class where I effortlessly distinguished myself, and by 1957, when I entered the fifth grade, I was cataloging an impressive list of plagiarized venial sins every Saturday afternoon in the dark confessional. I held my hands over my ears to avoid hearing the exact same confession from whatever boy happened to occupy the opposite cubicle of our three-seater, the old Monsignor separating us two liars. I ritually confessed that which I was not guilty of in order to make up for not confessing what I was guilty of, about the most heinous crime I could imagine. I was ten years old, and I had discovered by accident that an older woman of twelve undressed in front of her bedroom window every night precisely at ten, ten-thirty on weekends. She was apparently very proud of her small but clearly developing breasts, because she admired them every night, almost as much as I did, before slipping over them a pastel nightgown. I dreaded the night she would discover the error of her two-thirds-drawn window shade, and was much older when it occurred to me for the first time, a blinding revelation, that the lovely little minx probably knew perfectly well my hot ten-year-old breath was fogging the bedroom window opposite hers. When her family packed their belongings and moved to Florida a year later, I felt a sense of loss rarely paralleled in adult life, though by then her performances had grown less frequent, even as her breasts had grown more worthy of adoration.

  I cannot imagine that my confessions impressed the good Monsignor, but for one reason or another, I was made an altar boy, and thereby brought into the inner sanctum of the church behind the lighted sacristy door. It was a profound disappointment. Nothing mysterious happened there, and if any plotting was done, I wasn’t privy to it. The old Monsignor dressed in silence and spoke only from the altar and to the entire congregation. I soon realized that my selection did not mean that I was more holy, more worthy, more intelligent, or more fully catechized than the twenty or so boys passed over for the honor. My initiation into the ritual of fishing had been far more satisfying, and Wussy a far more amiable teacher, his tendency toward gunshot flatulence notwithstanding, than the old Monsignor, who said scarcely two words to me, leaving matters of instruction to the older boys. I thought things would change when I started serving weekday masses, where only one altar boy attended, but by then I knew what I was doing and the old priest had even less to say to me. From out in the congregation it had seemed that the boys on the altar were busy and essential to the service, but now I saw that the old Monsignor ran the whole shebang himself. At least with Wussy I had caught a fish.

  Things looked up, however, when Our Lady of Sorrows was assigned a young priest named Father Michaels to relieve some of the burden of duties from our aging and allegedly infirm pastor. Though not a large man, the new priest was a very handsome one, with longish brown hair and dark eyes. His hands and fingers were slender, like a woman’s, and just as white. Otherwise, the only truly notable thing about him was that he perspired terribly in all weather. He had been with us only a few weeks when the old Monsignor ordered all new outer vestments, very costly ones that priests within a parish often share, and made a present of the old darkening ones to the embarrassed young priest. Father Michaels always carried a thick cloth handkerchief with him when he said mass, secreting it on the altar behind the Bible stand, a respectful distance from the holy tabernacle, using it several times during the course of proceedings to mop his glistening forehead and neck.

  Father Michaels was very conscious of his perspiring, and on Sundays, when there were sometimes half a dozen irreverent altar boys on hand to remark the fact, he sweated even more profusely than during the week. When he distributed Communion, with me preceding him backward along the altar rail, gently inserting the gold communion paten beneath the urgent chins of the faithful in case their tongues did not accept cleanly the sacred host, the sweat actually dripped from the tip of the young priest’s nose, plinking onto the gold plate, like rain into a tin gutter.

  We took to each other right off. Unlike the Monsignor, who was always in the sacristy no matter how early I arrived and who managed to convey the impression that boys were undependable by nature and that he would probably have to do my work—lighting the candles, cleaning out the censer and making sure it contained a fresh lump of charcoal, toting the big red Bible up the pulpit steps—Father Michaels often blew into the sacristy through the side door ten minutes before mass was supposed to begin, blinking, tired, and mussed, as if he’d just been awakened in the middle of a nightmare.

  “You’re the only one?” he said nervously the first morning I served the seven for him.

  I said I was.

  “Aren’t you a little young to be going solo?” he said, as if he hadn’t counted on himself to be there with me. I was by then a seasoned one-year veteran, and had to resist the temptation to remark that he too looked a little young for a solo flight.

  Before leaving the shadowy sacristy for the bright altar, he always said, “I guess we’re all set then?” as if he couldn’t be sure without getting my educated opinion on the matter. I doubt mass would have been said that day had I professed uncertainty. But I never did, and so he took a deep breath and put his hand on my shoulder, the way a blind man grabs hold of someone he trusts not to lead him over any open manholes. He was complimentary of my bell ringing, my handling of the water and wine cruets, my lighting of the candles. “When Ned Hall lights a candle,” he often remarked, “it stays lit.” That might have been said for any candle lit by an altar boy, but it made me feel good anyway. After each successful mass, when the sacristy door closed behind us, Father Michaels acted like it was all my doing. “Ned, you’re a wonder. You’ll be pope someday.”

  After we got comfortable with each other, he wanted to know about my father. The old Monsignor had probably told him a little, because the new priest already knew Sam Hall wasn’t around. It had been over three years since he left Mohawk, I assumed, for good. I never talked about my father with anybody, including my mother, and at first I felt awkward, but I soon learned that talking about him didn’t make me feel the way I had thought it would. After mass, Father Michaels and I often sat on the sacristy steps in the sun, and there I told him how I had lied about my father being dead, and about his nocturnal marauding, and about the fishing trip with him and Wussy, and how that ended with my mother shooting the convertible. He laughed at the part about the fishhook in my father’s thumb, and I did too, though it had never seemed funny before. When I got to the shooting part, he went pale and wanted to know if I was exaggerating, as if it made him uncomf
ortable to think that one of his parishioners owned a gun, much less shot one. He had trouble associating the mother of my story with the quiet, pretty woman he’d seen in church who sometimes waited for me when mass was over.

  Perhaps to make me feel better, he told me about his own father who had been a drunk and beaten him and his mother until his unexpected and highly unusual death. When he spoke about the man, his eyes became unfocused and distant. Apparently, when Father Michaels had been a year or two older than I, his father had had a vision which reformed him on the spot. At the time he had been on a bender for nearly two weeks, during which he had not been home, much to the relief of the boy and his mother, whose eyes he had blackened before leaving and which were still greenish yellow. When he finally returned one afternoon, his wife was prepared to leap from the third-story window if necessary, but though shaky, her husband was sober and dressed, unaccountably, in a new suit. He was shaved and combed, and he announced that he had returned to them a new man. He certainly looked like one. The boy and his mother scarcely recognized him. The bag of groceries he was carrying was welcome though, as was the news that he had a job, a good one. He then kissed his wife’s yellow eyes and asked his son if he would like to go to a ball game at the Polo Grounds while his mother prepared dinner. At the ballpark they drank sodas and watched the game from high in the stands, and Father Michaels remembered it as the happiest day of his young life.

  When the game was over, the older man took his son’s hand and together they came down out of the stands. Father Michaels remembered the bright sun seemed to rest right on top of the opposite bleachers, and perhaps for that reason, his father thought they had reached the bottom when there was still one step to go. As a drunk, he had miraculously survived his share of dangerous falls. More than once he had missed the top step on the stairs outside their third-floor flat, unaware that he had done so until he discovered himself seated on the landing below. He had fallen off chairs, out of moving cars into gutters, off porches, off bicycles, off ice skates, off countless bar stools, even off women. But that afternoon, when he was sober and full of new life and aching love for his long-neglected boy, his leg stiffened when he thought he had reached the bottom of the stadium stairs, and though he had misjudged where he was by inches, his leg shattered like a dry twig, the separated bone driving up into his groin. He immediately went into shock and died before the doctors at the hospital to which he was finally taken could diagnose the problem.