The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “I wonder where he gets that from.”

  “Not his mother. She’d talk whenever.”

  Eileen came over.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she told my father after rattling off a long order.

  “Like what.”

  “Like it’s my fault. What’s wrong with him?”

  Silence. Shrugging, probably. All three of them staring at me now. I read song titles.

  “Anybody ask him?” Eileen said.

  “I’m fine,” I said, a little too loud, still not turning around.

  “You could say hi, after you get that jukebox memorized,” Eileen said.

  I punched in “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog,” a song I knew she hated, but Eileen was gone with a trayful of cocktails high over her head before it could come on.

  “Sit here,” my father told me, indicating the bar stool he’d laid claim to. Rolling up his sleeves, he went around to the other side of the bar. “We’ll see if we can’t get a free meal off this tight son of a bitch.”

  By nine the place was even more crowded than when we came in. My father washed glasses and sliced fruit for the frozen daiquiris while Mike and the other bartender poured and rang the register.

  A woman I couldn’t see, seated somewhere on the far side of the room, kept cackling, “I love it, Jesus, I LOVE it!” her voice somehow clear and distinct above the din.

  Eileen came in from the dining room, saw my father and grinned, then told Mike she thought she might have to take somebody named Karen into the girls’ room and break her face. Mike said he’d give her a raise if she did. Irma, Mike’s wife and the restaurant’s hostess, appeared in the doorway a moment later, and pointed a dangerous-looking finger at him. My father saw this and advised Mike to just run away. “I LOVE it,” the woman in the far corner howled.

  “What do you figure she loves, Sammy?” Mike said.

  My father started to answer, then remembered me and didn’t.

  Around ten, a well-dressed party of a dozen or so came in and I recognized F. William Peterson among them. He didn’t notice me, but started visibly when he saw my father, who was rolling his sleeves back down now that Mike and the other bartender had things under control again. Eileen came in and said she’d arranged for a table in her section.

  “You see your buddy?” she said.

  “Yep,” my father said.

  “Kindly remember I work here.”

  “So do I,” my father said, showing her his wrinkled hands; even the blackened thumb and forefinger looked soft and porous. “We’ll sit a minute. We’ve waited this long. Irma’s gotta let you off eventually.”

  My father took out some one-dollar bills and handed me a few for Liars. We’d played only a couple when a drink arrived and Mike said guess who. “Shall I say thank you?”

  “If you want to,” my father said.

  In a few minutes F. William Peterson came over. He looked quite relieved when he saw me, probably figuring that meant my father wouldn’t start trouble. “Sam,” he said. “Ned.”

  “Well?” my father said.

  “So,” said the lawyer. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” my father said. “I think there are four threes.”

  “Have you talked to Ned?” the lawyer said.

  “Every day. He lives with me.”

  So, I thought. This is how it will come out. I will be officially informed of my mother’s death in a noisy bar. Then we will go in and eat dinner. My father will explain that he’d been meaning to tell me, that he was waiting for the right moment, that it was just like F. William Peterson to mess things up, like he’d been doing for how many years now? How old was I? Right. For damn near thirteen years he’d been messing things up.

  F. William Peterson’s face was red. “I guess I don’t understand your objection.”

  “It’s like I told you before,” my father said. “You tell me what you’re going to do with the money and it’s all yours. Just don’t give me that crap about it being her wishes. You may have bullshitted her into giving you power of attorney, but you aren’t bullshitting me. You can have the money, like I said. I just want to know what you and your doctor buddies are going to spend it on, that’s all. You’re all going to the Bahamas? Fine. Just don’t try and bullshit me.”

  By the time my father finished, F. William Peterson was so angry he’d forgotten to be scared, but he kept his voice low. I could barely hear him over the bar noise, but I’d never seen him so animated. “How’d you get so smart, Sam?” he said. “How’d you figure it all out like that? How’d you know I needed that little run-down piece of shit worth all of ten grand so I can retire in the tropics. You’re too smart for guys like me, Sam. I should have known better than to think I could pull something over on a sharp cookie like you.”

  “Well, Attorney Peterson,” my father said. “I may not be the smartest guy in Mohawk County. I may not even be as smart as you. But let’s see how smart you are. See if you can figure out the only reason you aren’t flat on your ass.”

  Mike was now looking over at us and trying to pretend he wasn’t.

  My father nudged me. “Tell him ‘you’re welcome.’ Tell him if it wasn’t for you he’d be right on his ass. And while you’re at it, ask him how much longer he figures it’ll be before he ends up there anyhow.”

  Eileen came in on the fly, nodding at Mike behind my father’s back. “We’re all set up,” she said. “You want to eat or what.”

  When my father stood, F. William Peterson moved back a step, though he still looked determined and flushed.

  “You want some dinner?” my father said to me.

  I stood up, turned toward the dining room.

  “You want some dinner?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “TALK, for Jesus Christ’s sake!” he said.

  “That’s great,” F. William Peterson said. “Take it out on him.”

  I think F. William Peterson knew he’d finally pushed the wrong button even before my father hit him. Either he had the slowest reflexes of any man I ever saw, or he was a fatalist. The punch my father threw was short and hard, and F. William Peterson’s lip seemed to burst like a grape upon impact. Suddenly his whole chin was red, and he wobbled uncertainly before righting himself. If the bar hadn’t been so crowded, he might have gone down. Instead, he blinked twice and said, “Agh!” quite loudly.

  Mike’s other bartender, who had made his way around the bar but arrived too late, grabbed my father and pinned his elbows behind his back and Eileen stepped in front of him to prevent my father from kicking F. William Peterson, who was still within range.

  “Agh!” F. William Peterson said again, even more loudly, as if he’d been hit again with some phantom blow. Everybody looked at him, puzzled, including my father. Then F. William Peterson did something nobody expected. He sneezed. Apparently my father’s punch had glanced off the lawyer’s nose, causing an uncontrollable, undignified sneeze, the force of which sprayed blood from his split lip all over everybody in the area. Eileen’s white uniform was suddenly speckled, and a man in a light blue, summer sport coat, who had not seen the punch my father threw, but who had the misfortune to turn just when F. William Peterson sneezed, looked down at the shoulder of his jacket and said, “Hey! Have a fuckin’ heart, Mac!”

  Suddenly, Irma, Mike’s wife, looking mean as a snake, was in the middle of it and Mike himself was heard trying to soothe things, saying that it was all over and just a misunderstanding. Eileen finally succeeded in turning my father in the general direction of the dining room, a sensible plan made difficult by the fact that the big bartender seemed reluctant to let go. The lawyer sneezed violently several more times into his own bloody hand, apologizing fervently between onslaughts. Nobody noticed me, for which I was grateful, because I was crying and I couldn’t stop.

  A few minutes later, somehow, my father and I were seated in the dining room with everybody staring at us. I was choking back sobs, and
my father was telling me not to worry about it. We were both looking at menus. “You got any business of your own, lady?” my father said to a woman at a table near ours.

  “Why, yes. Thank you so much,” she said.

  “Good,” my father said. “Good for you.”

  After a while, people did go back to their meals.

  “You gonna cry all through dinner or what,” my father said, not looking up from his menu.

  I didn’t say anything. In the lounge, things had quieted down. Mike came in and said he’d got it all fixed, adding that there wasn’t much that a round of free drinks wouldn’t take care of, but he looked angry just the same, and Irma stayed away from us entirely. “What’s the matter with him?” Mike said before returning to the bar.

  “Nothing,” my father said. “And if he doesn’t stop it in about two seconds …”

  “Forget it, buddy,” Mike said to me. “Your father’s all right. Everything’s all right.”

  18

  “There,” my father said the next afternoon. “You feel better now?”

  The answer to that was yes and no, but I said yes and it appeared to satisfy him, that and cuffing me alongside the head. He put the convertible in gear and headed us back toward Mohawk.

  “I still don’t get it,” he said.

  I had blurted out, finally, there in the restaurant, when Eileen joined us, that I knew my mother was dead, that I just wished somebody would say it. They looked at each other in disbelief so authentic that I considered them the best pair of liars I’d ever run across. They worked on me for about ten minutes, but I wouldn’t budge. I was that sure. To unconvince me (and to show that there were no hard feelings) my father went back into the bar and fetched F. William Peterson. He looked pretty awful with his lip swollen up three times its normal size, even before my father explained the misconception I was laboring under, and then the poor fellow looked like he was going to cry. If he was lying too, he made my father and Eileen look like pikers. Which meant they weren’t liars, at least not on this occasion. Which meant I had some explaining to do. I started out with the For Sale sign and how it had made me think she was dead. Otherwise, why was our house being sold? And what was this talk about power of attorney and following her wishes? I explained how just about everything people had said during the last week or so had confirmed my suspicion, though now that I thought back over the various conversations, the evidence had been far from conclusive. It seemed to fit because I was convinced that my mother’s death was part of what I saw as my own downward spiral into neglect and ignominy. Naturally, since I saw both my father and Eileen as symptoms of that decline, I didn’t mention that more abstract fear to them.

  Now, of course, in the bright sunshine of a spring afternoon, I saw all of my hasty and erroneous conclusions concerning my mother in pretty much the same light as my father did—as bird-brained. The worst of it was that I had not trusted my own father. I had virtually accused him of withholding from me my own mother’s death. Blessedly, the stupidity angle bothered him more than any demonstrated lack of faith in him as a good, trustworthy father. Every time he thought of some other reason why my mother couldn’t be dead—like how come it wasn’t in the paper? Why didn’t anybody stop me on the street and say they were sorry to hear?—he trotted it out and examined my faulty logic further, as if he planned not to let the matter rest until I’d been officially entered in some sort of fool’s compendium.

  “There,” he said, pointing to a For Sale sign on the front lawn of a small brick house set back a ways from the wide Schenectady street, then to another house on his side of the road. “Look at all the dead people’s houses.”

  I didn’t say anything. Another few residential blocks and we’d be coming up on the Thruway entrance. Then there wouldn’t be any more real estate signs until we got back to Mohawk. Not that he would forget in the interim. The next sign he saw would put him right back on the same track, and it was easy to foresee that real estate signs were destined to be a reliable source of ridicule in the future. For Sam Hall there was no statute of limitations on other people’s idiocy. He may even have felt that there’d been a kind of unwitting justice in the whole circumstance. After all, as a kid I’d told people he was dead; now I’d unwittingly done the same thing with my mother.

  “Well?” he said, pointing out one last sign.

  What he was after, of course, was a smile, and I was holding out, as usual. Once he decided you owed him a smile, he just kept after you until you paid up. Normally, I would have given in, but I didn’t feel like smiling at him today. As soon as I gave him what he wanted, he’d stop razzing me and want to know about her, how she’d looked, whether we’d talked, what we’d said. I preferred the razzing.

  I knew it was cruel of me to want to withhold information about her condition from him, but I did. It wasn’t that I was particularly angry with him anymore. And it certainly wasn’t that I wanted to protect him from any guilt he might be feeling concerning her, since I wasn’t sure he felt any, unless you count as guilt a vague, general regret at the way things sometimes worked out. Rather, I didn’t want to open the subject of my mother’s condition because I knew I’d start lying to him. I couldn’t tell him that my visit had lasted all of five minutes; that after he’d let me out in front of the home at one, promising to return at three, I had discovered her frail and alone in the large communal dining room next to the long window that overlooked the rambling, shadowy grounds out back, where tall pine trees prevented the sun from melting the still deep snow; that I had not been permitted to just walk up to her like a son, but had to wait while she was “prepared” for me, her mind given the opportunity to adjust; that a nurse had been dispatched to tell her, startling my mother out of her meditation on the reluctant, wintry grounds beyond the protective glass; how she had listened for the longest time, not appearing to comprehend, then finally looked slowly around the large room until her gaze fell upon me beneath the tall archway, seeing there someone she was not sure she recognized.

  And who could blame her? I hardly recognized myself, having grown a couple inches in the seven months since she’d seen me last and become even more angular and birdlike as a result. Since going to live with my father, I wasn’t the same boy. I felt certain that I carried myself differently now, that my gait was altered, my mannerisms different. Had I swung my arms before, when I had been her son, the way I did now? Did I have, back then, my current habit of standing on one foot? Had I that sullen expression that sometimes surprised me in the cloudy bathroom mirror of my father’s apartment? I wanted to be her son again, if only for the afternoon, but I’d forgotten how and did not know where to begin.

  When the nurse finally motioned to me, I went toward them slowly. When I reached the table where my mother was sitting, the nurse took her hand and then mine, so that we could touch. “Jenny,” she said. “This is your son Ned. Do you know him?”

  “Why, yes,” my mother said. She had watched me all the way across the room, but the other woman’s question distracted her now and she looked away from me and up at the nurse. “This is my son Ned.”

  “And a very fine-looking young man,” the nurse said. “You must be very proud.”

  My eyes were already full, but the nurse took no notice. Instead she pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat me down next to my mother. “Now I know how happy you are to see Ned,” the nurse said. “But you mustn’t forget to eat your lunch.”

  My mother was looking at me again and did not appear to hear.

  “Jenny?” the woman repeated, and this time my mother heard and looked down at her plate, which clearly had not been touched, a small square of something under a coating of tomato sauce, alongside some washed-out-looking peas and a tiny roll, all of it cold and unappetizing. “Would you like me to stay?”

  Only when my mother lifted her fork and slid it beneath the triangle of peas did the nurse leave us alone. I watched my mother chew the peas, her attention again drawn to the scene outside her
window. “The snow won’t go away,” she said, as if this were a matter for concern.

  “It has, most places,” I told her.

  “Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter,” she said, then turned to me, smiling. “Good Ned.”

  Almost unbelievably, we stopped in at The Elms on the way home. Over the years one of the points I’ve debated about my father is whether he was in those days impossible or just very difficult to embarrass. Here it was less than twenty-four hours after he’d started a fight there; a normal human being would have taken at least a temporary leave of absence from its vicinity, especially since it wasn’t one of his regular in-town haunts anyway. True, Eileen worked there, assuming Irma hadn’t fired her for consorting with undesirables, and sometimes my father stopped in for a quick one before she got off her shift, but he had already demonstrated during the long months when he was broke that he could live without The Elms, where Mike got “some kind of a price for a lousy bottle of beer.” So, it seemed to me the easiest and (considering Eileen) the kindest thing in the world to give Mike and Irma wide berth for a few penitential weeks, at least until the sharp edges of their current and completely understandable resentment were worn smooth by other concerns.

  But no. Back we went, like iron filings to a magnet. I could feel myself glowing scarlet with shame when we pulled into the nearly empty parking lot. It was late afternoon, in between the big after-church wave and the smaller early evening one. I could tell by my father’s gait that he saw no reason we shouldn’t be a welcome antidote to the late Sunday afternoon boredom that was sure to have gripped the place, especially if the basketball game was one-sided and the previous evening’s exhaustion imperfectly banished. To his mind, we were just what the joint needed. If Mike and Irma wanted to remember something about the night before, let them recall how he’d washed glasses and sliced fruit. He’d bailed them out, and maybe it was time they showed a little gratitude.

  Pretty clearly though, gratitude was not Irma’s first emotion when we appeared in the doorway of the dark lounge. She was seated at one end of the horseshoe bar next to her husband, who was hanging dripping cocktail glasses upside down from the overhead rack.