The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  The man called Tree went over and examined the screen door, which angled crazily now on its bent hinges. “You’re about as close to an evildoer as we get around here. By the w-way, somebody said you w-w-weren’t around, if anybody was to ask.”

  “That’s all straightened out,” my father said, glancing at me. “Just a couple of fellows I met out in Nevada.”

  “Too bad they didn’t work on your kneecaps. What’s the kid’s name?”

  My father told him.

  Tree looked me over and shook his head. “Never adm-m-mit he’s your old man,” he advised, “and m-maybe you got a chance.”

  “You hurt my f-f-fucking back, Sammy,” he added.

  My father told him to come with us. There was a little, dusty-looking tavern called The Lookout just outside the park entrance. There were a couple cars out front. One was a cream-colored Mercury convertible that looked like somebody had ridden hard, though there weren’t any bullet holes that I could see. “We’ll get Alice to rub your back,” my father said.

  “I’m w-working,” Tree said, nodding first at the shack, then at his uniform, as if these constituted proof. “Besides. Alice and I aren’t getting along.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since lately.” He stared down the dirt road at The Lookout with a mixture of longing and fear.

  “Suit yourself, Tree.”

  “I c-c-could drink a beer,” the man admitted, then considered everything for about two seconds. “Let me lock up, at least.”

  Inside the guard shack, he took some money out of a shoe box and put the thick wheel of red tickets in a drawer and locked it. Then he locked the inside door and did the best he could with the screen, throwing my father another malicious glance. “Park closes day after tomorrow anyways,” he said. “W-w-wouldn’t be much point in canning me, I guess.”

  He counted the money as we walked, then put a rubber band around it. “Took in f-f-fourteen dollars,” he said. “They gotta pay me twenty.”

  “That’s about right,” my father said. “Mayor of Mohawk works things the same way.”

  Tree shrugged. “July, we do two, three hundred a day. More on weekends.”

  “What’ll happen to that big roll of tickets when the park closes tomorrow?”

  “Disappear, p-p-probably.”

  My father nodded. “You’re all right, Tree.”

  The Lookout was dark and cool inside. When the screen door clapped shut behind us, I couldn’t make out anything but the flickering lights above the shuffleboard machine and the scripted fluorescent beer signs. Tree and my father went straight for the long bar at the other end of the room. They either knew where it was or were used to night soundings. They took stools at the opposite end of the bar from The Lookout’s two other patrons. I figured my father had forgotten me completely until he checked the stool next to his and I wasn’t there.

  “Well?” he said when I finally arrived. I climbed onto the vacant stool at the end of the bar, pleased that for once I seemed to understand the significance of his favorite question.

  A huge woman seated behind the bar was talking to the other customers. You couldn’t exactly see the stool she was sitting on, but there had to be one. All along the bar were lighted candles in red goblets that reminded me of the stained glass in Our Lady of Sorrows, and my father used one to rap on the bar. The huge woman was already looking at us and shaking her head.

  “You got a little exercise, you wouldn’t be so fat,” my father observed good-naturedly.

  “Or I could have more customers like you, in which case I could just sit still and starve,” the woman said, making no move to get up. “What’s this? Your first visit in three years?”

  “It wasn’t me that told you to put this place way the hell and gone out in the woods.”

  That was apparently an adequate explanation, because the woman got off her stool with surprising lightness and came over. “And look what you drag in with you when you finally show up.”

  My father nudged me. “You don’t have to take that, you know.”

  That confused me, because I could have sworn she was referring to Tree, whom she was glaring at maliciously. For his part, Tree looked like he would have liked to run away.

  “Hello, Tree,” the woman said, so loud he jumped. I jumped too, just to keep him company.

  “H-h-hi, Alice,” Tree managed.

  “Well, what do you know,” Alice said. She’d lowered her voice, but was still glowering at him. “He can talk. Every day for a month, he sits over there in his little shit-house, but he’s too busy to stop and say hello. I thought somebody ripped his voicebox out.”

  “I never knew you’d treat me so n-nice or I’d of c-c-come in before.”

  “You want to talk about the way to treat people, is that it?”

  “Hell, Alice,” Tree said. He was clearly suffering, and that, at least, seemed to cheer Alice up a little.

  “Hell, Tree,” she said.

  “When you two are all done, could I get a beer?” my father said.

  Alice looked over at me for the first time. She had nice eyes, but she sure was a big woman. “And he’s eighteen, right?”

  “Eleven,” my father admitted.

  “Twelve,” I said, because I was.

  “What?” my father said.

  I told him I was twelve.

  He thought about it, counted on his fingers, then shrugged. “Say hello to Alice. She’s not as bad as she looks.”

  “Or sounds,” Tree added, though it got him another murderous glance.

  Alice drew beers for my father and Tree and put a 7-Up in front of me. “Too good-looking to be yours,” she remarked.

  “He is though, just the same,” my father said.

  “Somebody said you were having problems,” she said, her voice confidential.

  “Who, me?”

  “Who, you.”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  “You should have come by.”

  “I thought about it.”

  “And?”

  “And it wasn’t your problem.”

  They both looked at me then as if it were my turn to say something and I’d missed my cue.

  “Anyhow, it’s all straightened out now,” my father said.

  Tree had slid off his stool. “So where are you going?” Alice said.

  “To pee,” Tree said, with an injured expression.

  “You gotta watch him,” Alice said. “He’s a great one for sneaking off.”

  “Hell, Alice.”

  “Hell, Tree.”

  Alice and my father talked softly for a few minutes and when Tree came back, he sat in the middle of the bar instead of with us. After a while Alice went over and they talked, quietly, not yelling. Then Tree surprised me by putting a hand on hers and she surprised me by letting him.

  “So,” my father said, turning to me for the first time. “What’s this I hear about your mother?”

  * * *

  I tried not to tell him, at first, because I knew she wouldn’t want me talking about her, especially with my father. So I tried to play dumb, like I didn’t know what he meant.

  He put out the cigarette he was smoking between his thumb and forefinger and sat the stub on its filter. I watched the procedure with more interest than I felt, not wanting to meet his eye. After all those bogus confessions at Our Lady of Sorrows I counted myself about as good a liar as Catholics ever got, which was good. But I hadn’t much confidence a lie would work on my father. He’d always known what was going on at our house better than if he’d lived there. But I heard myself say, “She’s fine,” in a voice that wouldn’t even have convinced somebody like Father Michaels, who believed whatever you told him.

  Surprisingly, my father did not contradict me. At least not exactly. “Glad to hear it,” he said. “Somebody said she was sick.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he got up and went over to the cigarette machine, stopping on the way back at the other end of the bar where the
two men who were there when we came in still sat. Tree and Alice were still holding hands midway down the rail. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Tree kept shrugging his shoulders and looking hangdog.

  On the wall above where I sat was a conical beer sign, and rather than think about my mother or the implications of lying to my father right after not seeing him for so long, I devoted myself to figuring out how it worked. A small bead of light traversed the cylinder in waves, elongating all the way up the crest and down the other side, but shrinking to bead size again in the trough, its color always changing, first red, then blue, then green, then yellow, then white. Somehow they got the bead of light to move, change shape and color, but I was stumped.

  I drank the rest of my soda, ate the cherry, and was still puzzling over the beer sign when my father came back and tossed the pack of Marlboros on the bar. “Don’t ever smoke,” he said, lighting up.

  “I saw Wussy,” I said, for something to say.

  “So he said.”

  I thought about mentioning the bike, but if it wasn’t my father who bought it, I didn’t want to know.

  “I’m surprised you remembered him.”

  I said I remembered all about the fishing trip—the gadget he’d given me, getting caught in the rain with the top down, our dinner in the woods, the fishhook he’d gotten stuck in his thumb. He’d forgotten most of it, all except that part about my mother shooting at him when we got home. It felt funny to remember it all so clearly when he didn’t—like maybe I should have forgotten it too, since it wasn’t that important.

  He finished his beer and squeezed the life out of another cigarette, standing the gray butt up next to the other one, exhaling the last of the smoke through his nose.

  I looked at his black thumb and forefinger. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I said. It was something I’d always wanted to ask him.

  “Nah,” he said, placing his hand palm up on the bar so I could examine the hard, yellow-black skin that extended all the way down the inside of his thumb and forefinger. “You just have to do it all the time.”

  “Didn’t it hurt at first?”

  He shrugged. “So?”

  I tried to think of a so, but couldn’t come up with anything good.

  “So?” he repeated, cuffing me in the head to indicate that the subject wasn’t closed yet, and wouldn’t be until I offered at least a feeble argument against self-mutilation.

  I took a deep breath, and when the yellow comet’s tail of light became a pure white bead, I said, “I think there’s something wrong with her. She quit her job.”

  He nodded. “So I heard.”

  When the two men at the other end of the bar got up and left, Tree and Alice slid further away from us, and then I told him all of it. How she’d borrowed money on the house; how she never went out, even onto the porch anymore; how we telephoned for groceries; how I cashed checks at the bank, how she stayed in her room more and more, how I suspected that she was getting more scared every day; how her world was shrinking; how the ringing of the telephone caused her hands to shake uncontrollably; how sometimes she even seemed frightened of me. The only thing I left out was the business with Father Michaels. In the roughly two years since it had happened, I’d come to understand, gradually, what had happened, and what the consequences had been. The only thing I didn’t know was whether anyone else knew.

  In response to what I did tell him, my father just rapped the bar with his dead thumb. Somebody else would have asked all kinds of questions, but not him. It made me realize that I hadn’t wanted to tell him or anybody else because I doubted they’d believe me. And when my father did, I felt a sudden, almost overwhelming love for him, as if the five long intervening years amounted to nothing.

  At the other end of the bar, Tree leaned forward and kissed Alice. “Hey. Go get a room, why don’t you,” my father suggested, not that they paid any attention. Turning back to me he said, “Maybe you better come stay with me for a while. Unless you don’t want to …”

  I remember thinking at the time that it was dumb even to consider it, that I was not really my father’s son, that it wouldn’t work. But there were Alice and Tree, and I remember thinking that life was full of things you couldn’t figure. How could you be sure something wouldn’t work until it didn’t? And even if my father wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the prospect (he’d said “you better” as if only in a terribly imperfect world would it be preferable that I live with him “for a while”), so what? Maybe it would work anyway. “Maybe,” I said. “For a while.”

  10

  Downtown Mohawk had never been much to look at and was never exactly prosperous, but it had once been whole, at least. No more. The old hotel, the most elegant of the structures along Main, had come down when I was eight, leaving a large gap in the center of the block. The rubble had been quickly removed, the space graded and blacktopped, parking meters installed. But the effect was unsettling. There was no longer an unbroken corridor of three-story buildings, and the vista now offered by the new parking lot was like a glimpse behind a painted stage backdrop in a theater, all rusted pulleys and frayed ropes and dark, smoky windows. With the demolition of the Mohawk Grand, the illusion of a thriving downtown was forever shattered, and within the next few years three more buildings were vacated, condemned, and summarily razed, all on the same side of the street. Disturbed by the implications of this trend, the city council had commissioned a huge sign to be painted on the now visible side of one of the adjacent buildings. SHOP DOWNTOWN MOHAWK it began, in big block letters ten feet tall, “Where There’s Always Plenty Of Parking.”

  And then still other buildings came down, giving the street a gap-toothed appearance further emphasized when smaller, one-story, strangely temporary-looking buildings were erected as an alternative to the parking lots that were fast becoming the town’s long suit. The remaining three-story buildings all exhibited narrow fissures from their stone crowns, down brick faces, all the way to the street. It was in front of one of these—Klein’s Department Store—that my father parked his cream-colored Mercury convertible that afternoon. There was a big empty lot next door, but my father pulled up, one wheel over the curb, right beneath a no parking sign. I thought at first that he was planning to go into the A&P up the street, probably to get something for our dinner.

  “Well?” he said. He had gotten out of the car and was standing on the sidewalk. “Grab something.”

  On the backseat of the convertible amid the usual Sam Hall clutter—greasy tools, rags, an old hooded sweatshirt, junk mail—were the two cardboard boxes we’d filled with the contents of my dresser and closet.

  He raised the hood of the trunk, pulled out the bike, and headed for a dark doorway beneath an unlit brick arch. I looked up at the black third-story windows, my heart sinking. I grabbed the smaller box with my underwear and socks, leaving on the seat the larger box containing my shirts, pants, sweaters, and jackets.

  The door he had disappeared through had “Rose’s Beauty Salon” stenciled on the window, several letters flaked or missing. Inside, the narrow flight of stairs was dark, with no handrail on either side. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling at the second-floor landing. At the third there was a foyer and two doors. One said, ROS ’S BE TY S LON. Inexplicably, the same letters were missing on the upstairs and downstairs doors. As my father inserted the key into the other door, which had the words ACCOUNTING DEPT stenciled in big black letters, a woman with a large beehive of bright red hair emerged from the beauty parlor.

  “Jesus Christ, you scared me, Sammy,” she said, staring quizzically at the bike he was carrying, as if it presented a riddle my own presence did little to solve.

  “What are you scared of, rape?” my father said.

  “I wish,” she told my father. “Who’s the kid?”

  “Meet Rose,” my father said. “She’s all right for a red-headed Polack.”

  “Polack and proud of it,” Rose said. She offered me a hand full of nails painted the same shade as the
beehive. I balanced my cardboard box and shook. “Rape I could handle,” she said, looking right at me, as if I had been contemplating it. “It’s the goddamn robbers that scare me. This used to be a nice town.”

  “When?” my father said.

  “Way back.”

  “I don’t go as far back as you, Rose.”

  “Like hell you don’t,” Rose said. “I seem to recollect graduating with a kid named Sam Hall.”

  “Not me.”

  “Not you.” She nodded, still looking at me. “Your kid like to work?”

  “Ask him.”

  “I’ll give you fifteen bucks to clean the salon on Sundays. Wash the sinks. Vacuum. Empty the trash.”

  “Sure,” I said. Fifteen dollars was a lot of money. My mother had only made eighty-three a week at the phone company.

  She looked over at my father. “I been trying to talk your old man into doing it, but he’s too good. I never knew he had such a handsome son.”

  I was confused again. The woman never seemed to look where she was talking. When she took a bright key off her pink rabbit’s foot key chain, I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to keep it or give it to my father. The key seemed to be mine, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to trust me with something like a key. I’d never even had one to my mother’s house, and until today I had belonged there.

  But Rose seemed confident she’d done the right thing. “You look responsible. Not like your old man.”

  “There you go,” my father said when she disappeared around the corner at the landing below. “Now you’re employed.”

  My father’s apartment had clearly once been part of the department store below. The inner walls which separated the various large rooms were of different construction than the outer ones and did not go all the way up to the ceiling, which was very high and peeling green paint. The living room was huge, its dimensions further emphasized by the fact that my father appeared to have next to nothing to put in it. He leaned my bike up against the wall near the door as if he were grateful for the additional furniture. An old sofa floated in the middle of the room a good fifteen feet from the nearest wall, placed there, apparently, to be within shouting distance of the television in the corner, a monstrous piece of pale cabinetry for such a small screen. For some reason it was already on when we walked in. A television was one of the things I’d often yearned for and which my mother and I did without, though she insisted that it was a question of preference. She’d just rather listen to music on my grandfather’s old Victrola. My mother wasn’t the sort of person who needed a point of comparative reference to know what she preferred. In general she preferred not to have what we couldn’t afford. Still, even I wasn’t sure this TV of my father’s represented much of an improvement over our antiquated radio at home. The screen was so full of snow that the difference between Huntley and Brinkley was purely auditory, and the events they reported were all played out against a backdrop of intense blizzard. Along the wall opposite the television was a sink, a small refrigerator and a two-chair Formica dinette. That was it.