The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “Keep them,” my father explained. “Then next summer when it gets good and busy, he’ll bring in eight or ten a day. People expect a ticket when they pay, so he’ll give them one. Not from the new season’s roll. They’re numbered. The boss counts how many are given out every day. The money for those goes right in the drawer where it’s supposed to. The money from the old tickets will go into Tree’s pocket.”

  He let me think about it for a while. “Well?” he said.

  “It’s dishonest,” I said finally.

  “Uh huh,” he admitted. “And?”

  When I didn’t know what he meant by the question, he clarified it. “So what?”

  I made my way back down the stairs to the basement and emerged from the stairwell just as the elevator doors opened. My father was framed by the interior light, his black finger on the button that held the door open. “Well?” he said. “You decide to stay down here?”

  He was grinning, and I saw there was no button outside the elevator. The wall was as blank and featureless as it had felt in the dark. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the elevator could not be summoned from below.

  I got in.

  “What’s the matter?” my father said.

  “Nothing,” I said angrily.

  The elevator strained upward.

  “You wanted me to leave you down there in the dark, is that it?”

  “Yes,” I said through my teeth, staring straight ahead at the stupid control panel on the elevator wall, hating it blackly, hating the way it worked, hating him too. “Yes.”

  13

  We got along all right, most of the time. During the week my father worked on a new road up in Speculator, and he was usually gone in the morning before I got up for school. He returned around seven, having stopped for a couple of quick ones on the way down the mountain. Then we’d eat hamburg steak dinners across the street at the Mohawk Grill where there were plenty of people my father knew to keep us company. He was held in high esteem by just about everybody there because he had a good-paying job outside of Mohawk, unlike the rest of the men, who worked, when they could get work, in the few remaining tanneries and glove shops. They also liked him because he was an easy touch and had a lousy memory. Seldom did our dinner go uninterrupted by some hangdog supplicant, hands shoved deep into baggy trouser pockets, hovering over our Formica table, making obligatory small talk before wondering if maybe, Sammy, you could spare ten, because things weren’t so hot and there wasn’t any food in the house for the kids and, Jesus, was this any way for an able-bodied man to have to live … in Mohawk … in fucking Mohawk, excuse the language in front of your boy, but is this any way for a man to live? Then my father, who did not own a wallet, would fish in the pocket of his work pants for the folded wad of bills he kept in no particular sequence—tens, ones, fives—and peel off a couple, sliding them across the table unobtrusively so that the other men in the diner didn’t have to know that it was a touch taking place and not just talk about the Giants, though they must have had a pretty good idea and some were probably thinking about their own prospects. Then the supplicant, always slightly more erect in posture for the infusion of cash, would tell my father to look for him come Friday, and my father would say sure, all right, Friday. He would often run into the same man later that night in Greenie’s or The Glove or one of the countless other twelve-stool bars where a ten-dollar bill bought a man-sized share of camaraderie and oblivion at fifteen cents a draft, forty-five cents a shot.

  If my father didn’t turn up by seven or so, I usually made myself a sandwich out of the small refrigerator and prepared for an evening alone. On such nights he would not careen in until after the bars closed. Then he would piss for about five minutes in the general vicinity of the commode before falling asleep on the sofa with his mouth wide open. He had traded in the ragged old couch for an equally suspect model with just as many miles, but which converted, by a tricky, complicated process, into a double bed. On late nights, however, he was unequal to a task requiring so much dexterity, and since comfort wasn’t the issue he usually decided the hell with it. Four hours or so later, the alarm having wound down to a feeble tinkle, he would jolt awake with a loud “Ah!” and go pee again, with even greater urgency and, blessedly, accuracy. Finding himself still dressed from the night before, there would be nothing to do but stumble down to the Mercury, trusting the cold wind to air him out and sober him up. It was asking a lot, even with the top down.

  On still other evenings we drove over to Eileen’s. Usually, we’d stop at a market and buy a big package of pork chops and a couple cans of creamed corn to take with us, and Eileen Littler would fry the chops in butter and oregano and mash a half dozen potatoes into huge white mounds. Eileen, it turned out, was a direct lineal descendant of Nathan Littler, the town father, and his fabled sister Myrtle, whose park Eileen’s small brown house sat at the edge of. The decline of the Littler family more or less paralleled that of Mohawk itself. Eileen excepted, the two dozen or so Littlers remaining in the county now lived, albeit marginally, on public assistance, which permitted them lives as full of leisure as their privileged ancestors. According to Eileen, who always held down at least two jobs and hadn’t much use for her relatives, they’d all inherited a lazy gene. Her own industry, however, did not prevent her from being equated with the rest of the Littlers, and she herself was viewed as an object lesson in moral decline.

  Right before the war, Eileen was said to have gone a little wild, and half a dozen surprised local boys claimed she was sending them into battle with at least one thing to be grateful for. When she disappeared from Mohawk, rumor had it that she’d followed one of these boys to an army camp in Savannah. But she was gone a long time, and when she reappeared she had a baby on her hip. Some maintained that she had married down south, others that her timing had been bad, and that she would have to await the end of the war to marry the child’s father. And there were those who said that her timing was pretty good, that she’d had the war years to decide who she wanted the father to be, to see who made it back and in what condition. When the news of the surrender reached Mohawk, people remarked that Eileen Littler was as full of anticipation as any of the town’s young wives-in-good-standing, but for her these exciting months passed uneventfully, and no young soldier came to claim Eileen or her son. When she enrolled the boy in grade school, he had his mother’s name, Littler, now thoroughly and finally besmirched. In place of the lazy gene, Eileen had inherited a stubborn, circumspect one, and if the matter of the boy’s paternity remained an open question for the curious, they knew better than to raise that question to her face.

  This new degenerate breed of Littlers all died penniless, and were buried in the county section of the cemetery, far from the huge black marble obelisk that marked the grave of their distant ancestor. My father told her not to worry. As soon as she died he’d have her cremated, have the ashes put in a mason jar, which he’d bury in a little hole under the black obelisk. “Right on top of old Nathan,” he promised, “so you’ll have someone to talk to.”

  “As long as I don’t end up next to you,” said Eileen, who claimed that hell would be having to talk to Sam Hall throughout eternity.

  “Don’t get me riled,” he threatened, “or I’ll put Zero in there with you, too.”

  “You plan to outlive everybody?” she said.

  “Yes, I do,” he said, nudging me.

  About the time the three of us sat down, the motorcycle would roar up the driveway and Drew—that was the boy’s name—would saunter in, plant his helmet on the table next to the bowl of creamed corn, and spoon about half the mashed potatoes onto his plate by way of hello. If he made conversation at all, it was with me. He’d taken, at least once, most of the classes I was now in, and he considered himself an authority on every teacher in Nathan Littler Junior High. “That asshole,” he’d say, not without affection. Having finally made it to Mohawk High, he was nostalgic about my school, where he’d enjoyed himself immensely. Most afternoons, w
hen the junior high let out, Drew would be out front astraddle his motorcycle, in the shadow of the big statue of Nathan Littler, his own distant relative.

  A meal at the Littlers’ was a feast of tension which always seemed to me on the verge of erupting into open hostility. When the motorcycle roared up the drive, Eileen always warned my father to be good for once, but his promise seldom amounted to much. Having watched Drew fill his plate with potatoes, my father would nudge me and nod across the table. “Not a bad life,” he’d say. “Ride around on your motorcycle all the while. Take money for gas from your mother. Show up for a free dinner when you’re hungry. Eat without bothering to wash your hands. Then say, ‘So long, Ma,’ and off you go. Ma can do the dishes, wash the clothes, work all night while you ride around and pretend you’re a big shot. Not a bad life, if you can swing it.”

  “You my father?” Drew would say.

  “I wouldn’t admit it if I were.”

  “Don’t blame you. Be embarrassing to have a kid that could kick your ass.”

  “Any time you want to try,” my father would say, carefully cutting a chop. It was part of the way they talked to each other at such times that neither would look up from his plate. I often thought that if either had made eye contact with the other, blood would have been shed. The expressions on their faces were terrifying, and I was glad they concentrated on their food.

  “Let’s all mind our own business, shall we?” Eileen would suggest. “I like Ned better than either of you. At least he doesn’t go around flexing his muscles all the time.”

  “Hasn’t got any,” Drew pointed out, not untruthfully.

  I would flush twice over, once because Eileen had remembered I was there and said something nice, and again for lack of musculature. I liked Eileen a great deal. I liked the way she didn’t get bent out of shape about things. My mother could have learned all sorts of things from her if she’d felt like it.

  Actually, Drew and I got along fine too. After dinner I’d go out to the garage with him and act as spotter while he bench pressed. He was only five-ten, three inches shorter than my father, and he had a fleshy midriff, but his arms and shoulders were massive. I very much admired his strength. When he lay on his back on the narrow bench, his blond hair hung straight down and a single blue vein on his broad forehead pulsed when he held his breath before exploding into the lift. The weight of the bar was something he seemed to take personally, as if in his imagination he had infused the cold metal with life and personality. He shoved the steel up and out of his way with savage contempt, as if its mere presence offended him. On those occasions when he misjudged his strength and needed me to help guide the wobbling bar back to its resting place, his expression darkened and he would give up, refusing to take weight off the bar, refusing to try a second lift. He had failed, and that was all there was to it. He would then turn his attention to the cycle, pulling it all apart, as if while lying on his back beneath the great weight of the bar, he’d suddenly remembered something wrong with the way it was running. He’d spend the rest of the evening cursing the machine.

  But Drew was seldom defeated by the bar, and when his first lift was successful, he would continue his workout until exhaustion finally overtook him. Then he would get up from the bench—the only lifting he seemed interested in was from flat on his back—his chest swelling with accomplishment, his blond hair wet with perspiration, the blue vein on his forehead still throbbing intensely, as if its angry excited pulsing contained the very center of his being. Then he would fling one leg over the bike, kick back the stand, and roar down the steep drive. You could hear him changing gears all the way to the highway, and by the time he returned half an hour later his pale hair would be dry again and the blue vein gone from his forehead.

  Sometimes, depending on his mood, he would take me for a ride. The first time scared me good, because he took off before I could locate the pegs to rest my feet on, and when we took sharp turns my feet went straight out like wings. Leaning into the turns seemed foolhardy, and for a long time I refused to do it. Often I leaned in the opposite direction to make up for what Drew was doing in front of me, so that our bodies formed a V, Drew leaning into the danger, I away from it. Eventually I got better, but seeing the pavement whiz by a few inches beneath my kneecap was something I never did get used to.

  In the beginning we just circumnavigated a few blocks, but our rides got progressively longer. One night in late October, instead of just disturbing a few peaceful streets, Drew took us out to the highway and let the bike full out. On our right, the dark expanse of Myrtle Park, rising abruptly against the dusk, flew by. On the left, off in the distance, was the radio tower, its twin red lights pulsing. I hadn’t as much hair as Drew, but what I did have stood straight up and I felt the exhilaration of raw speed so strongly that I had all I could do not to howl in animal pleasure. Drew was rock solid as the bike itself, and together we leaned into the turns.

  About a mile beyond Myrtle Park we left the highway and followed a narrow, winding road until we came to a clearing at the top of a steep crest, and there before us, suddenly, was my white jewel house, the one I always wondered about from my perch in Myrtle Park. It looked different now, but I knew it had to be the same house. There could be no other like it in Mohawk, or in the entire county, or in the whole world. Drew pulled the bike over, let the engine die, and we just sat there looking at it, a mere hundred yards away.

  Up close, it did not glisten the way it appeared to from across the highway, but the house was even more vast and impressive than I had imagined. Its tall TV antenna caught the last ray of sunlight from behind the park, but everything else—the house itself and the surrounding lawn and woods were deepening purple, the highway below almost black.

  “Gotta be twenty rooms in there,” Drew said, his voice unexpectedly loud. The only other sound was the faint whirr of the cars on the highway below, their headlights flickering in and out of the trees.

  I couldn’t get over how strange it felt to be looking at the house up close, and even stranger to be in the company of Drew Littler. It was like learning that the girl you had a secret crush on for a very long time was also the object of somebody else’s affections. Somebody you doubted was worthy of her. “Let’s go,” I said. “We shouldn’t be up here. The sign said private road.”

  My companion shrugged. “It’s a free country. Besides. This house is going to be mine someday.”

  I must have made a sound, because he looked over his shoulder at me.

  “You wait and see if it don’t.”

  I shrugged.

  It didn’t matter much if I wanted to go. Drew didn’t. So we sat there and stared at the house and the long sloping lawn. If I’d been there alone, it would have been okay, but I could not enjoy the house from the back of Drew Littler’s motorcycle. I felt like telling him that he was nuts to think he’d ever own a house like this one, any more than I would. It was dumb to kid himself. I didn’t say it, of course, but I was surprised to discover myself so blackly angry at his presumption. Did he imagine he was going to come into a fortune just because he could bench-press more than anybody in Mohawk, assuming he could bench more than anybody? The dancing blue vein on his broad forehead embodied his only skill as far as I could see. Did he actually see himself seated at the head of the long mahogany table (I imagined one like that in the rectory of Our Lady of Sorrows) in the rectangular dining room, shoveling mounds of white mashed potatoes onto the gleaming china?

  “Come on,” I said. “They’ll be wondering where we are.”

  “Your ass,” he said quietly. “They’ll be glad. Your old man is probably banging her right now.”

  He was still staring at the house, but his expression had gone bad, as if he’d seen something nasty through one of the windows.

  My own face must have borne a similar expression, because when Drew looked at me he said, “You didn’t know they go upstairs so he can crawl on top and put it to her?”

  His voice was so full of contempt
(for me, it seemed then) that I had to lie. “Sure,” I said.

  He started up the engine. “Your ass, you did.”

  A man came out of the jewel house and stood on the patio, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. If I hadn’t been thinking about my father and Eileen Littler, I might have been able to take pleasure in the fact that I knew the man’s name. He was Jack Ward, and he was standing there trying to figure out more ways to spend money. When Drew revved the engine, the man looked up and saw us, but I doubted the angry revving bothered him much.

  Drew circled the bike once, then threw us back down toward the darkness of the highway below. “Fuck him!” he bellowed over the roar of the bike. “Fuck them all!”

  On Saturday mornings I went to see my mother, and the few hours I spent at our old house were always the strangest of my week, which is saying a good deal when you lived with Sam Hall the rest of the time. To begin with, the house itself had changed, a fact I attributed to so little of it being lived in. The air downstairs seemed full of dust, millions of particles suspended in midair. No doubt this was largely the effect of the heavy curtains remaining closed, only one of two windows leaking a narrow slant of light in which the universe of atoms played. The kitchen was in the back of the house, and the maple darkened and obscured the yard with its lush foliage and allowed only late afternoon light to filter through the kitchen windows. I suspected, though I could not be certain, that the gray kitchen now represented the outer extremity of my mother’s world, and that she ventured down into it no more than once a day.

  For a while I tried to convince myself that our arrangement was working and that, as she herself continued to insist, all she needed was a little time alone to draw things back together. She had waged her solitary war with the outside world too long. Only time would heal her wounds, restore her health. But I was gone only a month or so before I began to notice her face hollowing and the flesh along her upper arms growing slack. Like a cave-dweller, her skin became sallow, then almost translucent, and when I mentioned that I didn’t think she was looking well, she responded that she didn’t think it would work out (my visiting on Saturday mornings) unless “we” could refrain from comments of that nature. It was hard enough for her to get well without somebody offering personal comments. It wasn’t much of a threat, of course. I don’t know who else would have cashed her meager checks, straightened out the mistakes made by her grocer, and purchased anything that required leaving the house.