The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

“Look at the goddamn snow,” my father said seriously, as if snow were not a permanent condition on our television set. I was mentally adding up how much he would have lost if anybody had taken his wager.

  He must have been doing the same, because he shook his head and said, “Some fucking thing’s gotta give here. And quick, too.”

  A few days later my father’s personal fortunes took a turn for the better. Suddenly, there was money. Harry eyed him suspiciously as my father peeled bills off a sizable roll, but he took the money and that squared us at the Mohawk Grill. He also paid our back rent, along with the next month’s, thus guaranteeing that we’d be all right until he started work in the spring. The only other thing was to pay his bar tabs, especially the one at The Elms. He’d stopped going there when it got too steep, not wanting to embarrass Eileen. “Not that Mike gives a shit,” he told me. “Mike’s all right.”

  Mike was my favorite bartender. Whenever my father and I came in on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, he rang up No Sale and slapped a couple quarters on the bar for the jukebox so I could play Elvis and my own personal favorite, Duane Eddy. He let me sit at the bar, too, which I didn’t always get to do in some of the lesser dives my father brought me to. My father explained that in the better joints you didn’t have to worry because the cops stayed away unless they were called. In places like Greenie’s, where the men from the mills drank, the bartenders had to be careful, but Mike said never mind cops, as if he weren’t convinced of their existence. Sit at the bar. Eat peanuts. Watch the ball game. Anybody doesn’t like it, tough. Mike had the shiniest black hair I’d ever seen. His fingers were pink and elegant, his nails scrubbed white. He always ignored my father, speaking first to me. “So,” he would say. “How’s he treating you?”

  When I said good, he’d remind me that I didn’t have to live with such a stiff if I didn’t want to. I could come live with him and his wife upstairs over the restaurant. Today, though, he put his hand over his heart and pretended to stagger when he saw us.

  My father nodded knowingly. “If I had all your money, I’d have a weak ticker too. I’d be scared somebody else might get a dollar or two.”

  We took stools near the end of the empty bar. Mike put a quarter in front of me.

  “Take it,” my father said. “It’s his one good deed. When was the last time you bought a drink?”

  “VJ Day,” Mike said.

  My father tossed three twenties on the bar.

  “Sweet rollickin’ Jesus,” Mike said. “Go back out and come in again.”

  “Our friend working tonight?”

  “She’s off Thursdays. You know that.”

  “I forget.”

  Mike held one of the twenties up to the light, fingering it with his thumb and forefinger. “I heard somebody’d knocked over a Brink’s car yesterday. I never made the connection.”

  “We got time for a quick one, I guess,” my father said. Mike drew my father a tall glass of beer and poured a 7-Up for me while I was busy punching three songs into the jukebox.

  “So who’s this?” my father said when Duane Eddy came on. He always wanted to know who Duane Eddy was.

  Mike broke one of my father’s twenties, put the change on the bar. My father pushed it back at him, along with the other two twenties. “Let’s settle up,” he said.

  Mike took twenty-five, left the rest.

  “What?” My father frowned.

  “That’s it,” Mike said. “We’re square.”

  “Not close,” my father said. “Let me see.”

  “Trust me,” Mike insisted, but his eyes looked nervous to me.

  “Let me see,” my father said.

  Mike rang another No Sale and lifted the register drawer. Beneath it were a couple dozen tabs. Mike went through them till he found the one with my father’s name on it.

  My father surveyed the tab. The largest number, about midway down the column, was fifty-five, but it had been crossed out, along with each of the numbers beneath it, except for the last, which was twenty-five. Mike was red-faced.

  “So what the hell’s going on?” my father asked.

  “Take it up with your benefactor.”

  “You took money from her?”

  “She tells me it’s from you. How the hell do I know? You disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “Drink your soda,” my father told me.

  “Don’t go getting sore for Christ’s sake,” Mike pleaded.

  “Did you ask her for money?”

  “Jesus, Sammy.”

  “If I find out you did …”

  Mike threw up his hands. “She says it’s from you. What do I know? Your old man’s a knothead,” he said to me.

  “Bullshit,” my father said, his eyes still narrow slits. I sucked the last of my 7-Up through the straw.

  “Have some dinner,” Mike said when he saw we were really going to leave. “You and the boy. I’ll spring.”

  My father left the twenty-five on the bar. “You give it back to her. And tell her you had no business taking it to begin with.”

  “Sure, Sammy. Whatever you say. Suit yourself.”

  “I will,” my father said. “I do.”

  We stopped at the market on the way to Eileen’s. My father wasn’t saying anything, and I knew what that meant. At the store he slung expensive roasts into the cart, causing people to stop and look at us suspiciously. By the time we got to the checkout though, the purple had begun to drain from his face, and he stacked the meat in a careful pyramid on the counter.

  “How are you, young lady,” he said to the girl at the register, who was too bored to answer.

  My father nudged me, his favorite conspiratorial gesture. My part in such conspiracies was always the same. To get nudged. I’d come to the conclusion it was all he thought I could handle. “Whatever became of the child labor laws in this state?” he said.

  The girl did not seem to think that this remark applied to her. I didn’t see how it could myself. She was small-boned, but hardly a kid.

  He nudged me again. “I’ll give you a dollar for every year over sixteen,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  The girl rang the total, just over sixty dollars worth of standing rib, rolled pork roasts, hams, family-sized packages of ground beef, all bleeding profusely. The girl made a face, said “yecch,” and dried her hands before bagging. “I’m twenty-five,” she told us.

  “You’re just saying that so my son won’t ask you out,” he said, nudging me again.

  Actually, she looked more apprehensive that he would. By the time she was done bagging, she had bloody hands again, and she reiterated her “yecch,” as if her condition were our fault.

  “It will wash off, you know,” my father said.

  She might have believed that if she hadn’t spied his black thumb and forefinger, which may have looked to her like the natural result of bagging too many bloody sirloin tip roasts.

  My father wheeled the convertible out of the parking lot and up First toward Myrtle Park. “She’s a pretty good girl,” he said. “You ever get a chance to do her a favor, you do it.”

  For a moment I thought he was referring, inexplicably, to the checkout girl back at the market. Then I realized it was Eileen he was thinking about and probably had been thinking about since we left The Elms.

  “She’s not pretty, like your mother,” he conceded, as if he imagined I’d found his preference in the matter puzzling. I turned and stared out the window, my eyes filling. We’d stopped speaking of my mother by mutual unspoken agreement. My father had brought me to visit her in the Albany hospital only once. I’d wished he hadn’t. There’d been even less of her than the Sunday morning at the Old Nathan Littler Hospital when she’d been little more than a ripple of flesh and bone beneath the otherwise placid sea of sheets and blanket. The afternoon we visited her in Albany she had looked like a child, her long hair chopped at the nape of her neck, her arms bruised where she had been hooked up to the machines that monitored her vit
al signs. A nurse had explained it to me, assuring me that the crisis had passed, unaware that I knew nothing of any crisis, was unaware that her heart had stopped beating briefly during the week and that she’d been revived. Unaware that our turning up that particular weekend had been pure coincidence.

  My father had waited in the lobby, and I was too frightened by what I saw to say anything to him. When he asked me how she was I told him good and made up a small conversation about how she’d said she would be coming home soon and that we’d live together again. It was a week later when I learned the details of my mother’s brush with death. I was summoned to the principal’s office during home room. When I saw F. William Peterson there and the principal said why didn’t we use his office, my throat got tight and I could feel my eyes filling, until the lawyer made me understand that it wasn’t what I thought, that he had come to tell me she was out of immediate danger now and was being transferred to a nursing home in Schenectady, where I could go see her whenever I wanted. I didn’t tell my father about this either.

  “She’s a good girl, though,” my father was saying. I didn’t have to turn my head to know that he was looking at me. When we pulled up into the driveway, he let me look up into the dark woods of Myrtle Park for a minute before delivering the cuff to the back of my head that I was waiting for.

  “Stop crying,” he said.

  I did. I wasn’t, really, to begin with. Just scared I might start.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I said nothing was the matter.

  “I’m not going to marry her, if that’s what’s eating you.”

  It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn’t much better.

  “You can if you want,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  In the distance we heard the sound of a motorcycle approaching, and my father shook his head. “I’d cry too, if I thought I’d end up with Zero for a brother.”

  We got out of the car.

  “Smile,” he said. “And smooth your hair down.” It always stood up where he cuffed me. “You look like the village idiot.”

  There wasn’t much danger of my being mistaken for the village idiot with Drew Littler around. When the motorcycle fishtailed into the drive, its rider was so bundled against the cold that it could have been anybody. Anybody crazy enough to ride a bike in February with the temperature in the twenties. It hadn’t snowed in several days and the streets were dry, but the sloping dirt drive was spotted with patches of ice that had been a problem even for our car, which was now blocking the open garage, tall snowbanks close on both sides.

  The boy throttled down and waited on the rumbling cycle. My father made no move to get back in the car. Instead, he began to unload the groceries from the backseat, balancing the first bag precariously on the slanted hood. Drew Littler gunned the engine once for emphasis, then raised his goggles. “You want to move that trash heap?”

  My father ignored him, handing me one of the bags of groceries. We went around and in through the back, leaving him at the foot of the drive, gunning his engine.

  Eileen was waiting for us inside. “Move your car,” she told my father. Her voice had a sharp blade on the end of it.

  “Okay,” my father said. “Mind if I set these down first? You figure His Royal Highness can wait that long?”

  We put the bags of groceries on the dinette. Just in time, in my case, because the blood had weakened the paper and the roasts were threatening to plunge through. My hand and wrist were red and dripping.

  My father started to unload meat.

  “The car, Sam,” Eileen said, elbowing him out of the way. “You’re dripping blood on my floor. I just mopped it.”

  “Sorry,” my father said, as if he wasn’t, particularly.

  Outside, the motorcycle’s engine roared to life, and I heard a patch of rubber being laid on the street below. At first, I thought Drew had decided to ride off someplace, but then I saw his head flash by the dining room window heading up the drive. Immediately following, there was a dull thud; the engine coughed once and died.

  My father dried his hands on a paper towel and peered out the kitchen window, shaking his head in disbelief.

  I followed Eileen outside. The motorcycle was angled crazily, deep in the snowbank next to our car, its front wheel unaccountably up in the air. Drew had apparently tried to blast through the snow. The hard-packed part at the edge of the pavement had accepted the weight of the bike, but then the cycle had sunk seat-deep. Drew was still on it, looking like an astronaut awaiting launch. He got off reluctantly, himself sinking thigh-deep in the snow.

  “Terrific,” Eileen said.

  “Tell your friend,” her son said.

  My father came out, still drying his hands on the towel. “I never would have thought to park it there, Zero.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “Let me get this out of your way,” my father said, indicating our car.

  “Screw that rust bucket. Give me a hand with the chopper.”

  “What,” my father said. “A big strong guy like you? Just lift it right out.”

  “You think you could?”

  “Not me,” my father admitted. “But then I wouldn’t have put it there to begin with.”

  “Quit acting like children, the two of you,” Eileen said. “Help him, will you.”

  But my father was having too good a time. He might help, eventually. But not yet. “What good is it to lift weights all day if you can’t pick your own bike out of a snowbank?” he wanted to know.

  “Screw yourself then,” Drew said. “I’ll settle with you later.”

  “Wait about twenty years is my advice. And even then I’d be careful.”

  Then he nudged me in the shoulder hard enough to make me take one step forward. “Go help Dumbbell,” he said. “Take the heavy end.”

  Drew snorted at the suggestion that I might be able to help, and even Eileen smiled, as if the one thing the three of them could agree on was that I was the weakling of the group. I flushed angrily at that and without thinking climbed the snowbank and positioned myself next to the bike. Grabbing the seat with both hands, I pulled hard, actually imagining the cycle would come free of the snow, which had already begun to freeze around the back wheel. Instead, I found myself seated in the snow, my feet having gone out from under me, which everybody thought was pretty funny.

  When I followed Eileen and my father back into the house, leaving Drew to shovel the snow away from his half-buried bike, I was full of hatred so black that I can still taste it now, almost twenty-five years later. When I had fallen, one leg had gone under the bike and my groin had come in violent contact with the rear tire, sending waves of nausea over me like surf. At that moment, I hated them all blackly—my father, Eileen and Drew Littler, everybody. Even my poor mother, who lay wasting toward oblivion in a big strange bed in Schenectady. In the cold agony of surging pain and humiliation, I would have been content to consign them all to everlasting perdition. I’d have watched the flames licking them with perfect equanimity.

  “Do a roast,” my father suggested.

  It was Eileen’s turn to sling the unoffending meat this time, and that’s what she was doing, bouncing packages off the sides of her freezer. Altercations between my father and Drew always infuriated her, but my guess was that there was more to it in this instance. She’d been ready to take my father on when he walked in the door. The episode with the cycle had distracted her, but now she had remembered whatever it was that had angered her before. My father looked like he knew what was on her mind and wished he didn’t. He probably figured that getting her to cook a roast would have a calming effect. You couldn’t cook a roast and stay mad at the person who bought it, may have been his thinking. And that’s probably why she wasn’t having any part of our carnivore peace offering. The set of her jaw had my father looking like a scolded dog, an effect my mother had never been able to ach
ieve. He had always fought with her the way you would with a man, stopping only at the very brink of physical violence. He never treated her with the sort of care you use with something you considered fragile. And that’s what struck me at the time, because Eileen was the one who looked sturdy. In fact, when I saw that dark look on her face as she slung roasts against the back wall of the freezer, it scared me, and I remember wondering if maybe it didn’t scare my father too.

  But I don’t think so. I think he saw something I couldn’t see back then, and his expression was a little like the one he’d worn the afternoon we’d gone in to tell my mother I was going to live with him. It was as if when he looked at Eileen, he saw my mother the way she’d been that day, so broken inside that she couldn’t stop shaking.

  “A roast would take two hours,” Eileen said.

  “So?”

  “So it’s six now. So I don’t feel like doing dishes at ten o’clock. So.”

  “So don’t. I’ll do them.”

  “My house. My dishes,” she said. The freezer was full now, and when she tried to slam the door by way of punctuation, it just swung back at her. The second time she put her weight behind it until the whole refrigerator rose up an inch or two off the linoleum.

  “You want to go out someplace?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not? You’re done baiting my son. Let’s go out to eat someplace nice. Like where I work, maybe. While we’re there, you can threaten my boss, maybe.”

  “I wasn’t baiting him,” my father said. Only the first part of her complaint had registered. “He could have waited until we unloaded the groceries, in as much as he’s the one who’s going to eat them.”

  “Somehow I got the idea you were here for dinner.”

  “Not if you don’t want us,” he said, looking even more hangdog.

  The “us” made my presence official, and they both looked at me for arbitration. I would have flushed if the recent blow to my groin hadn’t drained all the blood from my face.

  “Ned can stay,” she said. “At least he’s no troublemaker.”

  “Neither am I. I just brought you some groceries. If I’d known that would upset you …”