The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “Well?” said my father, when he discovered me still in the doorway with my box of underwear and socks.

  The bedroom looked even more absurd. Containing just a small set of drawers and a single bed, it was the same size as the living room, and our steps echoed off the walls when we entered. “Drop that someplace,” my father said.

  I looked around for the right place. There was room for about five hundred boxes. Finally, he took it out of my hands and dropped the box where we stood. “There,” he said. “Easy.”

  “You gotta go to the bathroom?” he said, as if I looked like I might.

  I said I didn’t.

  “You probably will eventually,” he said. “It’s in there.”

  I nodded. I could see the commode from where we stood, and part of the tub. It looked like we had one normal-sized room, anyway.

  “You can sleep in here.” He motioned to the bed. “I usually fall asleep on the couch anyhow. You sure you don’t have to go to the bathroom?”

  I didn’t, but I went in anyway and closed the door behind me. I sat on the commode with the top down and wondered if I would be able to hold back the tears. On the small sink sat a cluster of my father’s toiletries. His toothbrush lay on the spotted porcelain next to his razor and cologne. A white puff had hardened at the end of the can of shaving cream. The narrow gray bowl had just enough flat surface to accommodate what was already there. I sat, waiting for the minutes to pass so I could flush the John and go back outside. Looking up, I noticed that even the bathroom walls did not go all the way to the ceiling. It was not an ideal place to pretend to relieve yourself.

  I flushed before leaving, but it was a wasted gesture, my father already having gone back to the living room where he was parked in front of the snowy television. I stood in the doorway between the two monstrous rooms, unsure what was expected of me. “You want something to drink?” he said.

  I said no.

  When I headed for the door, he wanted to know where I was going. I said, to get my other box of clothes.

  “Come sit down. We can get it after the news.”

  I did as I was told. When the news was over, he asked if I was hungry.

  “There’s no stove,” I said, because there wasn’t.

  “The diner’s right across the street.”

  I wasn’t sure how that rendered a stove superfluous, but to my father’s thinking it apparently did. He was looking at me as if he found me about as odd as I did him.

  “It’s not nice like your mother’s,” he admitted.

  I again felt tears beginning to well up and I didn’t trust my voice to say it was fine, it was all fine.

  “I’m not like your mother,” he went on. “That’s what you’ll have to get used to.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he looked over and cuffed me in the ear. “Don’t worry about her. She’ll be all right. Don’t go through life crying about things.”

  “All right,” I croaked, disobeying.

  Eventually he remembered the other box of clothes and went down after it. He was too late though; the backseat of the convertible was empty, and I could hear him cursing in the street below

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said when he returned. “Don’t cry over what you can’t help.”

  I wasn’t crying anymore anyway, so I took his advice, though it seemed to me that letting my clothes get stolen fell under the heading of things that could have been helped. And there were probably other things, too. My mother, for instance.

  He insisted that I take the bed. In the morning we would “get things straightened out,” whatever that meant.

  I undressed quietly and got into bed. On the other side of the unshaded window, Mohawk stretched outward, from the blank face of the building opposite, dusky above the streetlamps, then further up into the darkness of Myrtle Park, finally into the blackness of the night sky itself. I hadn’t much faith that the kind of straightening out my father had in mind would be all that beneficial to anybody, not after the way things had been straightened out with my mother that afternoon. We had driven there straight from The Lookout, and when we pulled up to the curb he told me to stay put. His plan was to tell her that this would just be temporary, that she could get over whatever was wrong with her better if she didn’t have any headaches for a while. Meaning me.

  So I sat out there in the convertible, half expecting either gunshots or a police car to come careening around the corner to carry him off. Instead, in a very few minutes, he returned and said I’d better go in and get what I needed. He looked shaken and I felt suddenly chilled. Never before in the history of our family had there ever been an amicable settlement. Could it be that my mother had actually agreed to let me live with him? If so, she was even sicker than I had imagined, and it came home to me then that the only reason I had agreed to live with my father was that I knew she would never go along with it.

  Up and down the street the leaves on the maples had begun to turn, and suddenly I did not want to leave. The modest neighborhood houses all contained whole families, it seemed to me. Ours had always been different, containing just my mother and me. That my father had learned to live without us was a fact I had become accustomed to. Us. My mother and me. Now it appeared that she had decided things would be better without any headaches, as my father put it, and it occurred to me there in the car, and later that night in my father’s bed, that maybe the problem was me. Maybe it had always been me. She had taken all she could, and now I was being handed over. It wasn’t a question of me deciding who I would live with. All that had been settled, and my life, in that instant, was changed. It was agreed that I would visit her on Saturday mornings, go to the bank for her like always so she would have money for the grocer’s delivery boy. That was all she needed.

  She had retreated to her room when my father and I went back to fill up the two cardboard boxes from my dresser drawers. We worked quietly and quickly, like burglars, walking on tiptoe past her closed door.

  After we had deposited the boxes in the backseat of the convertible, my father, to my surprise, said I had better go back in and say goodbye.

  “Let’s just go,” I said. I didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to hear whatever it was that she would say to me, didn’t want any explanations. Maybe, in a week or so, after I’d digested it. But not now. Not with my clothes piled in cardboard boxes in the backseat of my father’s car. Not in front of all the whole houses on our tree-lined block. I imagined the neighbors watching from behind darkened windows.

  My father shrugged. “Do what you want,” he said. “If it was me, I’d go say something.”

  I just sat until he cuffed me on the side of the head, his signal that I should look at him. I didn’t want to. He cuffed me again though, so I did. “You want to take your bike?”

  It was leaning against the back porch beneath the maple tree.

  I went to get it while he opened the trunk and rearranged the clutter. I could have put it in myself, but he took it from me and nodded toward the house. Telling myself it was to avoid the back of his hand, I went.

  Her door was still shut, and there was no response when I knocked. “Mom?” I said to the door. “We’re going.”

  There was a moment’s silence, a gathering up, then a formal voice. “All right, dear,” she said, as if she hadn’t spent the last twelve years trying to prevent this very event. And so I just stood there, the door between us, studying the tiny bubbles in the varnish, as if their design would tell me what to do. Finally, I pushed the door open a crack.

  She lay in the fetal position, her back to me. The squeak of the hinge had no visible effect, but when I put my hand on her shoulder, she began to shake, so I took it away. She tried to tell me something then, but she got stuck on the first-person pronoun, repeating it again and again. Everything but sorrow drained out of me as I listened to her. My knees became liquid. “It’ll be all right,” I told her.

  And then I left.

  Pulling away from the curb, my father sa
id, “How the hell did she get like that?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Stuff like that doesn’t just happen,” he said, almost accusatorily. There was something like fear in his voice, too, as if he suspected that whatever was wrong with her might be viral, contagious. He looked at me as if I might be a carrier. “Well?” he said.

  That night, he waited until he figured I was asleep, then left. I heard his footsteps echoing down the stairs. I got out of bed and went over to the window in time to see him emerge directly below and drive off in the Mercury. It was after midnight by then, but sleep seemed a long way off and I wished I’d had the foresight to bring a book to read. Spindrift Island suddenly seemed an improbable place though, and I doubted its power to comfort now.

  In the living room my father had left the television on, but the station had gone off the air. I flipped around the dial, but managed only to locate the last few bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then more snow. I was about to turn off the set when I noticed a small framed picture hiding behind the dusty rabbit ears. I held the photograph to the snowy screen for light and found myself studying a grinning, six-year-old me, all ears and teeth.

  It was an odd discovery. All you had to do was look around the room to see that my father didn’t have much. I wondered how he came to have me. It wasn’t a picture I recognized. Who had taken it? Had my mother sent it to him? Had Aunt Rose? And how had it found its way into a frame and onto his TV? I fell asleep soon after without having figured any of it out.

  11

  When you lived on the top floor of the tallest building in Mohawk, you didn’t really need curtains, or at least that’s what my father’s thinking must have been, because when the sun cleared the summit of Myrtle Park, it streamed right in our tall windows, warming the big apartment and making sleep next to impossible. I woke with the feeling that I had recently been cold, and vaguely aware that there was something strange about my surroundings, but not strange enough to be alarming. I dozed for awhile, until I remembered where I was and sat up.

  The vast, nearly empty bedroom seemed even larger in the daylight. The bathroom was a very long way off across the cold, uncarpeted floor, and my slippers were safely at the foot of the bed in my mother’s house. I dashed, wishing I’d done more than pretend to pee the night before. When I was done, I stood on tiptoe to check myself out in the mirror. The face that looked back at me seemed less desperate than last night’s.

  I found my father stretched out on the living room sofa in his undershorts, his mouth wide open, snoring loudly. I watched him for a few minutes, amazed. If it weren’t for the noise, you would have sworn he was dead. I put index fingers in my ears and watched with the sound off, but only for a minute, because it was too spooky. His eyelids were not completely closed, and the liquid eyeballs appeared to move beneath them. I wondered if maybe he was just pretending to be asleep so he could watch me watch him, a possibility that made me too self-conscious to stay in the same room with him.

  Back in the bedroom, on top of the box that contained my socks and underwear, was a large brown bag that hadn’t been there the night before. Inside were an assortment of shirts, a couple pairs of pants, and a lemon-yellow windbreaker, all in plastic wrappers. I piled the clothing on the bed and studied it nervously to the rhythm of my father’s snoring in the next room. Around him—never mind whether he was awake or asleep—I always felt a little slow, unequal to situations that should have been clear. Here was another. The clothing was my size and the bag that contained it had been sitting on top of the box containing my underwear. Surely these clothes were meant as replacements for what had been stolen the night before. A working hypothesis. I picked up each package and examined it in the plastic, less interested in the contents than the possibility that my father had rushed right out to buy me these things. If he had, the gesture might be interpreted as representing some affection for me, or a feeling of responsibility, at least.

  But where had the clothes come from? There were no tags and he had left the apartment long after the stores closed. It was now barely seven in the morning, two hours before they would open again. He simply couldn’t have purchased them in the interval. But if that was true, if they had been purchased earlier, then it was far from certain that the clothes were intended for me, since he could not have known that I would need them. Perhaps they were for someone else, coincidentally my size.

  One thing was certain, as it nearly always was where my father was concerned. There was a good chance that whatever conclusion I came to would be wrong and I would later be shown the stupidity of my reasoning, assuming I could even remember it when called upon. Still, it seemed to me that in the past I’d been more guilty of not jumping to obvious conclusions than jumping to erroneous ones. I had the impression that of the many character flaws my father privately noted in observing me, the most egregious was sluggish passivity. “Well?” I could imagine him saying, that one word containing a multitude of possible questions: How long do you intend to stand there in your undershorts? Can you figure this out, or do you need a blueprint? How many size-twelve sons do I have?

  I thought about putting on the same clothes I’d worn yesterday and pretending I hadn’t seen the others, but there were inferences to be drawn from this course of action as well. (So, I’ve got a blind kid?) The other alternative was to just stand there and wait for a nervous breakdown.

  In the end, I carefully unwrapped the package that contained a plaid shirt and removed the pins, saving them in a neat pile on the window ledge just in case. Then I did the same with the army-green chinos, which were a little long. I felt so nervous standing there in the new clothes that I decided I’d go for a ride and come back after he’d had a chance to wake up. The heat wave had broken during the night and the air coming in the bedroom window was chilly, so I put on the yellow windbreaker, grabbed my bike, and slipped out. My father’s snoring followed me all the way down to the sidewalk.

  The street was deserted, except for a few cars outside the Mohawk Grill. I pedaled slowly up Hospital Hill, and from there past the stone pillars and into Myrtle Park. I was glad for the yellow windbreaker, the air was so full of autumn. Up in the park, the sun only found its way among the pines in splotches. Since I had the place to myself, I raced along the winding paths until the chill in the air felt good, then rode over to my favorite vista and leaned my bike against a tree.

  Far out across the highway, the white jewel house I always admired gleamed in the clean morning light atop its own hill, and as usual I wondered what sort of people lived there, and what it must be like to wake up in such a big house, and what they thought about when they looked out from their vast privacy across the highway into the wild green of Myrtle Park. But maybe they didn’t look in my direction at all. Maybe way off beyond them was another gleaming house on another hill with an even better view, and maybe they looked at that. Or it could be that they just drew the blinds and didn’t go gazing off anywhere. Whoever they were, they had to be pretty happy about things.

  Directly below me, among the mounds of junk, a yellow mutt appeared and sniffed around for a good place. I tossed a pebble, which rattled off a car fender. I studied the shack with the corregated iron roof apprehensively. I knew my father was back downtown, snoring on the sofa, yet right then I felt him there below me too, as if there were no contradiction to his being two places at once. It was such a scary idea that I got on my bike and pedaled back downtown.

  I got spooked again when I dismounted in front of Klein’s Department Store. In one of the windows stood a boy mannequin wearing the same plaid shirt and green chinos I had on. His arms were extended outward from his sides, frozen in expectation, as if there were someone nearby he meant to embrace. But he had the small window all to himself and there was nothing much on his side of the glass.

  * * *

  My father was in the bathroom when I got upstairs, and Dave Garroway, Chet Huntley’s identical twin, was on the snowy television. I leaned my bike against
the wall near the door and tried to think if there was something I should be doing. If I’d been in my mother’s house, there would have been something, but here it was different. Making the bed seemed like a good idea, so I did that. I was finishing up when the bathroom door opened and he came out in his shorts, smelling of lime, his cheeks smooth, his hair wet and shiny.

  He seemed to have taken waking up and finding me gone pretty much in stride, though he looked me over carefully, in as much as I was back again and he had a minute. “The pants are a little long,” he observed. “How come you’re a runt?”

  That didn’t seem to require an answer, so I didn’t say anything. He stood there waiting though, and it seemed an awfully big room for two people with so little to say to each other.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “How come you’re a runt?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  That seemed to satisfy him. He nodded meaningfully, as if maybe he had an idea why I was a runt. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”