The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  As we receded from her along the Communion rail, her eyes followed us, and Father Michaels stumbled, then righted himself. His eyes no longer appeared focused and he began to have difficulty locating the tongues of the faithful. He looked like a blind man going on sound and touch, though I think I was the only one who suspected he was in serious trouble.

  When we reached the far end of the communion rail, we started working our way back, Father Michaels doing the backing now, I following, toward where my mother knelt. The communion plate was spattered with his perspiration, and when he missed the tongue of an elderly woman I was ready and caught the sacred host. The old woman looked surprised, for I had brushed her chin. Then she saw the host, her host, soaking up perspiration like a sponge in the middle of the communion plate.

  “Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi,” I heard Father Michaels murmur, as if the host were still between his thumb and forefinger. But the look on his face was terrible. The old woman before us waited patiently, but the priest could only stare down at his own hand as if it had betrayed him. Finally, as if convinced that she was the one holding things up, the old woman made the sign of the cross and arose uncertainly, turning away from the rail.

  Father Michaels took one step toward the retreating communicant and held out his own offending hand, as if to invite her return, but the communion rail was between them. He watched the old woman all the way down the center aisle. Then he met my mother’s half-lovely, half-alarmed stare, which shifted from him to me and back again, and for a moment it was as if we three were the only ones in the church, perhaps in the world.

  When the spell broke, the priest turned back toward the high altar. I stayed where I was. It occasionally happened that there were not enough hosts in the chalice to serve all the parishioners, and the altar boy was expected to remain at the rail to mark the celebrant’s place. And so I did, but not without misgiving, because I had seen the chalice and it was still half full. Father Michaels placed it in the center of the open tabernacle and then, for some reason, disappeared into the sacristy.

  At the Communion rail we all awaited his return, and when the organ stopped, the church was still, except for some nervous rustling. There’s no telling how long I would have remained there at the rail if one of the other boys had not retrieved me. The back door of the sacristy was flung wide open, and the other altar boys were clustered just inside, framed in the light, looking out across Skinny’s well-tended floral cross, past the rectory, past the bakery, past the boundaries of our collective imaginations, for we never dreamed anything like this could happen.

  7

  The most famous man in the history of Mohawk County was Nathan Littler, the town father. The junior high school, the hospital, and the city hall were all named after him, and there were statues erected to his memory on the long sloping lawn in front of the junior high and the terrace of the Mohawk Free Library. Nathan Littler never exactly did anything, he just had money. A lot of it he left to the city. About the only thing in Mohawk that wasn’t named after him was Myrtle Park, and that was named after his sister.

  A considerable body of myth surrounded Myrtle Littler when I was growing up. Local legend had it that she had been very beautiful and very unhappy. She died when still a young woman without revealing the great secret of that unhappiness. Now, over a hundred years later, her ghost haunted the great park at the center of Mohawk, searching for someone to share her terrible secret with. Those she told died. No one knew why.

  Her park was large and rambling, and the town had grown around its steep slopes on three sides, the new highway forming its northern boundary on the fourth. Its thick woods were allowed to go untended, and its macadam paths allowed to conform to the terrain, winding and turning back upon themselves. Two streets entered the park—one from the east, one from the west—but each dead-ended less than a hundred yards from the stone pillars that marked the entrance. Sometimes people in Mohawk grumbled about the park, which cut the town off from itself. Some places were less than a half mile apart, but with the park in between they could be reached only by going around. Every time there was trouble in the park the city council debated whether to cut down a swath of trees and blast a tunnel through the rock, but it was just talk and everybody knew it. The tanneries—the town’s lifeblood—conceded to be in temporary decline before the war, began to close down after its completion, victims of foreign competition and local greed. While the men who worked in the shops waited for them to reopen, the owners, those who hadn’t moved to Florida with their profits and the faith of Mohawk’s men and women, were working diligently to keep other industry out of the county, thereby ensuring that Mohawk would remain destitute even in the midst of postwar prosperity. There certainly was no money to squander on dynamiting the hillsides.

  The summer of 1959, the year I turned twelve, I loved to lose myself in Myrtle Park’s dark winding paths. Even on the sunniest days, the park was cool and shady, the macadam trails and dirt paths just right for biking. In the daytime, patches of sunlight revealed isolated gazebos back among the trees, and at night these were reportedly used as lovers’ hideaways. I wasn’t allowed in the park at night though. In fact, my mother wasn’t keen on the idea of my being there anytime, but the big twenty-six-inch bicycle that mysteriously appeared on our porch liberated me. When I waved goodbye to my mother and promised not to go too far (how far was that?), she could only wave back and hope. Since Father Michaels had walked out the sacristy door and down the street nearly two years before, my mother had scarcely left the house. Rumor had it he had been gathered up and sent somewhere, to Phoenix, or Santa Fe, or one of the other places my mother talked long distance with and dreamed of moving to. Now, except for work, she stayed put. We ordered our groceries from the only market in town that delivered and quit church cold turkey, both of us.

  The bicycle was just sitting there one morning, and we figured it had to be from my father because there wasn’t anybody else. Aunt Rose had gone out to visit the national parks and not returned, authorizing a local real estate company to sell her property and send the money to an address in Aspen, Colorado. After the bicycle arrived, I kept expecting a convertible to pull up in front of the house any day, but none did. Once two men in a black car came and knocked on the door, wanting to know how they could get in touch with my father. They said he’d come into some money. My mother offered to hold on to it for them, but they said they had to give it to him personally.

  One day when I was downtown I heard somebody yell. “Hey! Sam’s Kid!” and I recognized Wussy standing out in front of the pool hall. I was glad to see him, and he looked just like I remembered. He was even wearing the same kind of shapeless hat, though this one wasn’t decorated with fishhooks. We shook hands. His was large and brown. Man-colored.

  “Good-lookin’ bike,” he said.

  “My father gave it to me,” I said, hoping fervently that it was true, or that if it wasn’t, Wussy wouldn’t know.

  “You look a little better than the last time I saw you,” he said, as if it had been only a few days and not five years. “Your old lady still shooting at people?”

  I told him that he and my father had been the last, that she didn’t even own a gun anymore. He looked relieved, as if he’d been on the lookout for her all along and was glad he could give it up. I wanted to ask him about my father, but I couldn’t think of a way. Having dropped his name in connection with the bike, I didn’t want to admit I wasn’t even sure if he was in Mohawk.

  “Some men came by last week,” I told him, explaining about the money they had for my father.

  Wussy was interested. “Big guys? Black car?”

  I said yes.

  “If they come by again, tell them he went up to Alaska to work road construction.”

  “Alaska?” I said, my heart falling.

  “Right,” Wussy said, but he must have noticed how disappointed I was. “He’ll be back pretty quick,” he said. “You’ll look up some day and there he’ll be. That’s the
way with Sammy. It don’t do no good to wait.”

  We said goodbye and I climbed back on my bike.

  “You ever go fishing?” he called after me.

  I shook my head no.

  “Too bad,” he said. “You were an alright fisherman. Patient, too.”

  So, I took Wussy’s advice and stopped waiting. One day I’d look up and there he’d be, I told myself. As it turned out, the direction was the only thing Wussy got wrong.

  Most of the labyrinthian dirt trails in Myrtle Park ended up in somebody’s backyard if you followed them far enough, but there were so many and they were so complex that you could get all turned around, and by the time you came down out of the maze you’d be on the opposite side of town from where you thought you were. One of my favorite trails wound through the densest part of the park ending at the edge of a steep dirt embankment, at the foot of which was a shack with a sheet metal roof that gleamed in the sun. In the clearing around the shack were high mounds of junk. There were stacks of bald tires, car bodies without hoods, rusted hubcaps, foaming car batteries, splintered wooden ladders, broken sheets of fiberglass, brown bed springs. It was interesting to look down from the top of the embankment at all that junk, because a lot of it you couldn’t even identify and it was fun to see if you could figure out what it had once been used for. Sometimes stray dogs found their way into that clearing and sniffed among the mounds, looking for the right place to lift a leg. When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God.

  One afternoon, not long after I ran into Wussy, I stopped along the embankment and leaned my bike up against a tree. There weren’t any dogs to convert, so I just sat. It was quiet and cool, and you could barely hear the cars that whizzed by on the invisible highway beyond the trees. Still further, about a mile away on a hill of its own, a white jewel of a house sparkled in the sun. Green lawns sloped down into the trees on each side. There had to be a road to get up there, but you couldn’t see it. Sometimes I wondered what the view must be like from there. I was willing to bet you could see all the way to the river.

  I collected pebbles until I had a small pile. When there weren’t any dogs, I selected at random some target below and tested my marksmanship. Today, I selected the open window of a rusted-out DeSoto. The angle made it a challenge. Most of the pebbles just plinked off the roof. After a while I ran out of pebbles and started to unearth a rock at my feet. It had looked tossable until I started to uncover it and saw that the rock was about the size of a softball and far too heavy to throw with accuracy. I doubted I’d even be able to hit the roof of the shack directly below, a target I had always spurned as unchallenging.

  The rock hit near the peak of the corrugated roof like a gunshot, then banged down into the rain gutter. The reverberation had not even died when the door of the shack blew open and a man came out on a dead run. He didn’t look up into the park or anywhere. He just ran, and if he hadn’t been headed in the opposite direction, I’d have been running too, because the last thing I expected was for somebody to be inside that shack. At first I thought the man was trying to catch whoever threw the stone and was confused about the direction the attack had been launched from. But as I watched him tack left, then right among the mounds, head down, even as he hurtled fenders and sharp, ragged fiberglass, I realized he wasn’t chasing. He was running away. He looked back over his shoulder just once before he disappeared into the trees.

  It did not matter that I had not seen him in over five years. The surprise was replaced almost immediately with the same tightness in my chest that I’d felt the afternoon outside school when he’d leaned across the seat of the white convertible to open the passenger-side door. Sam Hall wasn’t in Alaska. He was in Mohawk. I didn’t care what anybody said. I knew my own father.

  Off and on for the rest of the summer I returned to the embankment in Myrtle Park, but the shack remained uninhabited, and when I rattled stones off the sheet metal roof, nobody bolted. Occasionally, shabby men appeared in the clearing below to root around in the trash mounds, removing a door handle from a rusted-out car body perhaps, then disappearing back into the trees in the general direction of the highway. I continued to mystify dogs until one day a mangy yellow cur caught sight of me, and the look on his face clearly said, “Aha!” as if my visible presence resolved an issue that had troubled him for a long time. He would spread the word.

  In contrast to the scene below was the white jewel of a house on the other side of the highway. It occupied the whole top of the hill, and on sunny days its whiteness reflected the sun like a tiny mirror directed precisely into my eyes. What would it be like to live in such a house? Though it looked very small in the distance, I knew up close it had to be huge. It drew the sun like a magnet, and I would have liked to see it up close, though I doubted you could get there from where I sat. There were two hundred yards of thick woods between me and the busy highway, then another quarter mile or so of the same before you even got to the vast sloping lawn. There had to be a road, probably on the other side of the hill, and, anyway, I wasn’t permitted to cross the highway on my bicycle.

  It occurred to me that summer, from my perch in Myrtle Park, that there might be any number of corrugated shacks in my personal future, but no jeweled houses. I could think of no good reason for my father to be living in such a place, if that’s what he had been doing there, any more than I could think why he had run away. But if my father had ended up in such a place, mightn’t the same happen to me? Until recently, I would have scoffed at such a notion. After all, I was my mother’s son, not his. He drifted into and out of our lives without influencing them unduly. We lived in a clean house on a nice street and we had what we needed. But things were changing, and I knew that they were, even though I could only guess why. Since that Sunday when Father Michaels left church by the side door, my mother had lost ground an inch at a time. When she was finally let go by the telephone company, she appeared almost relieved, and we lived for months on her modest savings account before she even began to look for work. When she came home from interviews, her hands shook so badly she had to sit on them, and there were days when she would not come out of her bedroom until midafternoon. She refused to go back to the doctor for more Librium, and without church to calm her down, she didn’t know where to turn.

  When the savings account money was gone and she’d quit making a pretense of looking for work, she telephoned F. William Peterson, who came to see us. His big gray car took up most of the curb outside our house. Before he actually came inside, he walked all around the place, studied the house and shed, the little yard. When he finally came in, I was sent out and they talked for a long time.

  “You’re making a big mistake,” I heard him tell my mother later when they came out on the porch. I was fielding grounders along the side of the house.

  “I just need some time,” I heard her say.

  “You need help, Jenny,” F. William Peterson said. He had only a few strands of baby-fine hair left on top, and these required constant smoothing.

  Then for a while there was money again; I did not fully understand how. There wasn’t a lot, though, and my mother watched what there was carefully, cutting back on the amount we ate and the extras we purchased. Every other week she called the bank with instructions to cash a check I would be bearing within the half hour. She herself never left the house.

  8

  That same summer I made a dubious friend. Compared to some of the other dubious friends who followed, Claude was harmless enough. By an odd coincidence, his family had bought Aunt Rose’s old house, and Claude hadn’t had time to make many friends, not that time was the issue. Mohawk was far from friendly to outsiders, and whatever it took to break into clique-riddled Mohawk High Claude didn’t possess, and he gave up after about a week. I was having similar difficulties in my first year at Nathan Littler Junior High. Claude was a big kid, but pear-shaped and soft-looking like his father, whose Connecticut employer had punished him with a transfer to Mohawk, where he
supervised the manufacture of small, plastic, lime-green swimming pools in the shape of turtles. Claude’s mother badgered her son about his weight, but Claude Sr. always took the boy’s part. “He’s built like his father,” he told her proudly, not sensing that it was precisely this that his wife would have prevented if she could. “Going to be a big man.” Then he tousled, or tried to, the close-cropped hair on the boy’s small head. He might as well have tousled a volleyball.

  Aunt Rose’s little house had always been one of the prettiest on the block, with bright green shutters and window boxes, and a small white fence, the sort you can easily step over, bordering the front and back yards. Claude’s parents immediately set about improving the property, even as their neighbors looked on malevolently. The two-story addition nearly doubled the size of Aunt Rose’s modest little dwelling, making it the biggest house on the block. But when the heavy machinery arrived a second time and began to scoop out large hunks of earth for what could be nothing but an in-ground swimming pool of immodest proportion, the neighbors circulated a petition to prevent its completion, claiming that it would be a hazard to the neighborhood children, who often cut cross-lots when they played. The real reason was that such ostentation had never been permitted in our neighborhood. The only pools in Mohawk were over on Kings Road by the golf course, and the wealthy Jewish section on the northwestern slope of Myrtle Park.

  Claude’s parents were Jews, as I later discovered, though so thoroughly reformed as not to practice their religion at all. Indeed, Claude’s father had expressed thoroughgoing distaste for Judaism’s more orthodox adherents, a sentiment he had hoped in vain might circumvent the covenants and restrictions of the Kings Road neighborhood. Anyone could have told him that wasn’t likely, but he didn’t ask anyone. The new in-ground pool was combined recreation and revenge, and the neighborhood petition lost momentum when in place of Aunt Rose’s little picket fence a five-foot-high chain-link fence went up around the entire property, undercutting the sole rational basis for objection, and refocusing the object of resentment from the big hole in the ground to the fence that surrounded it. There would be no cross-cutting this particular lot. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Claude Sr. often remarked with satisfaction and without attribution. It certainly was a fine fence, and when completed, the pool was fine too, along with the ramada and gas grill, all firsts in our neighborhood and all regarded with distaste.