The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  Clearly, from the tone of her voice, she counted herself among those who lived hard lives.

  “Perhaps your young friend would like something cool to drink, dear,” Mrs. Ward speculated, settling on a phrase midway between an indefinite pronoun and a specific identity. The traffic had resumed on the highway now, the cars on the shoulder inching back into the stream, an occasional horn blaring.

  There was nothing I would have liked better than “something cool” with Tria Ward, but her mother was giving me the willies, as did the fact that Tria herself had not uttered a syllable after saying my name. I thought perhaps this silence might be indicative of something. Perhaps good breeding required me to admit frankly at this juncture that I was not Tria Ward’s young friend, we’d met only once and then very briefly, that “something cool” might better be saved for those who could lay better claim to the title of “young friend.” On the other hand, if I declined the invitation, I would have to admit to being stranded there on the highway. In a moment, my father’s would be the only car left on the shoulder, and for some reason I did not want to admit to either Tria Ward or her mother that I had been abandoned. Trotting on home would not have been such a big thing, of course, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it off with them watching. Surely, Mrs. Ward would say, in her strange, formal manner of speech, you don’t intend to walk all that way into town, along that fearfully busy highway. I accepted.

  “Why don’t you have your young friend sit in the front with us, dear,” Mrs. Ward said. Jack Ward’s white Lincoln was sitting at the edge of the trees, and when Tria went around to the driver’s side, I followed her, failing to comprehend that she, not her mother, was going to drive. I think I may even have concluded, momentarily, that on extra-expensive big cars like this one, the steering mechanism was on the right.

  “Tria is learning to drive, you see,” her mother said from the other side of the Lincoln, only the top half of her head visible above the roof. Her daughter, a slender inch taller, climbed up on top of two large pillows that allowed her to see over the dash. Then Mrs. Ward also got into the car.

  That left me outside. I knew I had been invited to sit in the front seat, but it now appeared that all access to that front seat had been blocked. My problem, of course, was that I had mentally pictured the scene—Tria behind the wheel, I in the middle, close enough to admire the light brown hair along her slender arms, and the mother, since she insisted on intruding, riding shotgun. But with both of them already in the car, I didn’t see how it would be possible for me to assume my rightful station without crawling over one of them. Until Tria closed her door I believe I actually contemplated squeezing myself between her lovely self and the wheel, all the while muttering, excuse me, excuse me, just a moment, there we are. The fact that her mother’s door remained open finally clued me to the alternate seating arrangement I hadn’t imagined, and by the time I trotted around to the other side, Mrs. Ward had slid over next to her daughter, leaving me red-faced and despondent.

  “I myself do not drive,” Tria’s mother was saying when I ducked in and pulled the door shut. “So I am far from an ideal instructor. Her father is doing the real teaching, you see.”

  I nodded, crestfallen. If Tria Ward was old enough for a learner’s permit, then she was probably two years older than I, though she did not look any fifteen. But hadn’t she told me that she too was entering the eighth grade? Had I misunderstood?

  “I myself have never comprehended this nation’s ongoing fascination with the automobile. In this day and age, learning to drive is considered as necessary as learning to swim, though it certainly wasn’t in my day.”

  “You don’t swim either, Mother,” Tria Ward observed. She held the big Lincoln in the very center of the narrow road and we inched up the incline at no more than ten miles an hour, a hazard, it seemed to me, to anyone coming down the road from the house, or up from the highway at a reasonable speed, since they would come upon us virtually parked there in the center of the pavement. Had a yellow line divided the road, we would have been impartially astraddle it. Tria gripped the steering wheel hard, seeming to pull it toward her, like the column of an airplane, as if attempting with all her strength to get the big Lincoln airborne while still in first gear.

  “Water and your mother do not agree,” Mrs. Ward was saying, without explaining what the bone of contention between them might be.

  Up through the trees we crept, all of us straining to see in the deepening dusk.

  “My father drives a convertible,” I said, apropos of nothing other than a sudden need to plunge into the conversation and a vague desire to demonstrate my own familiarity with things automotive.

  “A convertible automobile,” Mrs. Ward said, as if the concept required analysis. “I think, my dear, that headlights just might be the order of the day.”

  This was true, of course, it being very dark among the tall trees, but I immediately wished the old woman had not suggested it, seeing the startled effect that this complication had on Tria. In order to turn on the headlights, she would have to remove one hand from the wheel, something she was apparently loath to do. Had she glanced at the dash she would have been able to locate the lights in half a second, but taking her eyes off the road at our current breakneck speed was unthinkable. So she was reduced to fumbling for the lights with her left hand. To make matters worse, when her left hand came off the wheel, her right foot, for some reason, came off the accelerator, as if the two opposite limbs were controlled by the same invisible string. She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.

  Suddenly, it was very quiet. The air-conditioning had gone off, and with it the radio, which had been playing softly. In their place we now had lights, and we all three watched the trees unaccountably climbing the hill before us. So were the ones out my side window. It was so quiet we could hear the sound of pebbles being ground beneath our wheels. We were adrift, backing down toward the highway at roughly the same speed we had climbed.

  With neither power steering nor brakes, the car was suddenly foreign to Tria. She tried everything she could think of, but nothing worked. She gave the Lincoln more gas, naturally, to no effect. The key in the ignition was frozen, the steering wheel locked, and her legs too short to press down hard on the brakes. With a look of pure terror, she turned to her mother and said something that surprised me more than anything that had happened so far—“I love you, Mother!” she said.

  Mrs. Ward turned to face her daughter with an expression that bespoke astonishment, fear, and sincerity in equal parts, as if both mother and daughter had been signaled unambiguously that the end of the world was near. “Why, I love you too, dear,” she said.

  We left the Lincoln right there, its rear end well off the pavement, its long front sticking way out onto the roadway. God, it was a big car.

  Tears tracked down Tria Ward’s cheeks as the three of us made our way up through the corridor of dark trees. She made no sound though. There was nothing wrong with the car, except that the engine was flooded from her attempts to accelerate up the hill after it had stalled.

  Unfortunately, my own driving skills were limited to what I had already done. You couldn’t very well be Sam Hall’s kid without knowing what to do about a rolling car. About once a month my father would park on an incline, put the car in neutral, and get out to talk to somebody. If I happened to be in the car, I’d just lean over and throw it into park when it started to roll. If not, he’d usually catch up to the convertible before it got too far. We changed the convertible’s broken rear reflectors every few weeks and drove blithely away from the fender benders and cracked headlights of unlucky adjacent automobiles. So, when I saw that Jack Ward’s big white Lincoln was about to bear us back into the trees, I knew what to do.

  What I di
dn’t know was whether I was permitted to do it. I mean, I wasn’t driving, and it wasn’t my car, and I hardly knew these people. I could imagine Tria and her mother deeply resentful of my impertinence if I were to just ignore the chain of command by leaning across and slamming the Lincoln to a rocking halt without permission. And, too, there was something a little unnerving about the two of them turning to each other and professing their love at that precise moment, as if doing so might have some sort of incantatory effect on the vehicle. So I didn’t do anything until we got up a pretty decent head of silent steam and I heard the back wheels on the soft shoulder. By that time, putting the car in park had about the same effect as slamming into a tree, which we would have done in another three feet. For a moment we all just sat there, our back wheels well below the road, the front ones on the outer edge of the shoulder in launch position, looking at patches of dusky blue through the treetops.

  “We’d made it very near the top, you see,” Mrs. Ward said to her quietly weeping daughter, as if reasonable people hadn’t any right to anticipate a better result, really, since very few automobiles ever made it the entire way. She pointed toward the house, just now visible through the trees ahead, to illustrate her point. “And we were very fortunate to have your quick-thinking young friend in our midst.”

  Somehow I didn’t feel like I was “in their midst,” though I was certainly tagging along all right, and quite happily too, thoroughly full of myself, utterly content to consider that I had saved the day, and only vaguely troubled to recollect that when I had finally lunged across the big Lincoln’s front seat to throw the car in park, I had planted my left hand, for leverage, squarely in Mrs. Ward’s crotch.

  “And the car is totally without damage, you see, so there is no reason for concern or alarm on the part of anyone.”

  I was unclear whether this last was to reassure her daughter or to anticipate an unfair response on the part of Jack Ward, who, at that precise moment, appeared on the patio and discovered us, three abreast, entering between the stone pillars at the far end of the oblong drive. He came toward us at a strange gait, as if he wanted to run, but knew he wasn’t supposed to. With all due respect to Mrs. Ward’s confidently uninformed opinion, I doubted the Lincoln was undamaged, at least if the grinding, then thunking noise it made when forced into park was any indication, but it had come to rest without hitting anything, and that, anyway, was a blessing.

  “What’s wrong? Where’s the car?” Jack Ward wanted to know when he was close enough to inquire. He looked at us each in turn, spending a little more time with me, since my presence posed a second riddle he plainly hoped was unrelated to the first. Surely his wife and daughter hadn’t traded in a new car on a used boy?

  “In the woods, you see,” said Hilda Ward. “Be a dear and fetch it.”

  “What’s it doing in the woods? Who’s this?”

  “Resting,” said his wife. “This young man happens to be our savior, if you want to know … if you can forget your beloved car for the moment.”

  “Saved you from what?” Jack Ward said. He stood before us now, hands on his hips, clearly frustrated at not getting the kind of information that genuinely illuminated.

  “From Lord knows what,” said Mrs. Ward. “Injury. Disfigurement. Death. Do you care?”

  “Of course I bloody care. What do you think?”

  “Well, then. That’s gratifying. Do run along and get the car and let us catch our breath. Then, perhaps we’ll tell you about it, since you care.”

  The woman’s tone was halfway between mirth and malice, but Jack Ward seemed less puzzled by it than I. “Sweetheart?” he said to his daughter, and the lovely child buried her head in his shirt front. “Oh, Daddy!” she said.

  “You run along with your father, dear. Show him where to find his beloved. He mightn’t be able to locate it otherwise, you know. In the meantime, I’ll entertain our savior.”

  And with that she took me by the hand—with her own cool and ever-so-dry hand—and led me toward the white jewel house.

  * * *

  “Something cool” turned out to be a layered green parfait in a glass shaped like a tulip. Mrs. Ward took me into a huge kitchen, where a short, heavyset woman was whaling away at an innocent piece of pale pink meat with a wooden hammer. She did not look happy to see us.

  “This is Mrs. Petrie,” Tria’s mother told me with a wave of her hand in that woman’s general direction. “Mrs. P., meet the young man who just saved our lives.”

  Mrs. P. looked like, if this happened by some strange chance to be true, she would have had me summarily strangled by way of reward.

  “Do you imagine,” Mrs. Ward went on, apparently unmoved by the other woman’s murderous expression, “that something cool might be given him? Something ice cream, you know, or something soda? He could sit right here, I think, don’t you?”

  There was a large wooden island right in the center of the kitchen, and it was ringed on three sides by tall stools. Overhead, suspended from the ceiling, hung a wrought iron circle from which a dozen or so gleaming copper pots and pans in a variety of sizes hung. Mrs. Ward had directed me to a stool directly beneath a still dripping one.

  “Quite a harrowing experience, actually,” she told Mrs. Petrie, without the slightest intention, apparently, of going into detail. Which was probably just as well, since the other woman gave no evidence of the slightest curiosity. “But we have excellent cause to congratulate ourselves that no one was … you know. Such terrible things sometimes happen to people.”

  Mrs. Ward appeared to be searching her memory for an illustration, but apparently Drew Littler, who might have qualified, it seemed to me, had already vanished from her consciousness. When, after a fleeting moment, she couldn’t think of anything terrible that ever happened to anyone, she gave up the project and remembered me. “Well now,” she said, “enjoy your … you know, and.…”

  And then she was gone, leaving me in the big kitchen with Mrs. Petrie, whose expression softened only slightly when the other woman disappeared. I got my parfait and a long-handled spoon to negotiate the tulip glass. Mrs. Petrie watched me eat the first mouthful, probably to see if I’d make a face, so I didn’t. Actually, it tasted pretty good, especially the green minty part. While I ate, she whacked away at the meat until it was thin, then divided it into squares and placed these in a puddle of what smelled like vinegar. After wrapping the bowl in cellophane the whole thing went into the refrigerator.

  “I hope she didn’t expect me to stay here till you finish that,” she said, though in truth I was only a spoonful from the bottom. “I was supposed to be home half an hour ago. I don’t suppose it would ever occur to her that I might have a family of my own to cook for or that they get hungry about the same time as other people.”

  From where I was sitting, I had a view of the drive and I saw the Lincoln emerge from the trees and pass between the stone pillars. Jack Ward was at the wheel, Tria, white-faced, beside him.

  Mrs. Petrie disappeared into a small room off the kitchen, then reappeared struggling into a lightweight raincoat. Her handbag she grabbed from atop the refrigerator. “I spect they’ll be in in a minute,” she said, “less they forget about you, which they might. There’s a half dozen more of those in the freezer and nobody around here ever counts a blessed thing. Eat them all if you want. Keep the glasses. Take home anything you like.”

  I studied her in vain for signs of levity. Did she possess some bizarre second sight that had allowed her to size me up as a thief right off? I hoped not, because I had no intention of stealing anything from the Wards. In fact, I’d given up thieving forever, right there in the Ward kitchen. Life had taken a miraculous turn. Just a few short days before I hadn’t been able to imagine ever seeing Tria Ward again, yet here I was eating out of a tulip glass inside the very house I’d studied from Myrtle Park and the rear end of Drew Littler’s motorcycle. And I was a savior no less. Tria Ward’s own personal savior. And she would be my savior, as well. She would reform me.
Once we had professed our love for one another, I would confess how I had sneaked down into Klein’s Department Store back when I was shiftless. She would want to pay it all back, of course, out of her own money, but I’d nix that. I myself would sneak down into the store once a week, slipping ten or twenty into the register until I was an honest man again. By then I would be of marriageable age. I formulated this whole scenario as I sat there beneath the dripping pot.

  Outside I saw Jack Ward and his daughter emerge from the garage and from where I sat in the kitchen I got just a glimpse of Tria as she darted down the hall, where I heard a door open and close.

  When her father spied me, he looked puzzled, as if he’d forgotten about me entirely. I stood up. “Sam Hall’s boy, right?” he said.

  I admitted it.

  “Left you all alone, did they?” he looked around the kitchen.

  I shrugged, as if to suggest that this did not matter.

  “It happens around here,” he said.

  How strange I must have appeared to him, standing there at parade rest in the middle of his big kitchen, waiting for I knew not what. Something.

  “There’s a ball game on, probably,” Jack Ward said, though there was no television in sight. “We could watch that.”

  I followed him out through the dining room into a smaller one that was walled with bookcases that rose right to the ceiling. Most of them were full of books, though some held expensive-looking knickknacks like the ones I’d stolen to spruce up our old house. I even recognized a piece or two, and I thought it strange that anybody would actually buy pewter goblets and cut glass owls and green bottles wrapped in leather.

  There was a television in the corner of the room and Jack Ward turned it on, ripping through channels impatiently. When he didn’t find a ball game, he turned it off again, though I’d have been happy to watch just about anything on a TV with no snow.

  “You like to read?” he said.

  I said I did. Very much.