The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  He looked around the room with distaste. “Well,” he said, letting the thought trail off. It was my father’s word, but with Jack Ward, you could guess what direction his thought was headed. “Somebody’ll be in in a minute,” he said, without much confidence. And then he too was gone.

  Maybe Jack Ward didn’t care for it, but I was never more impressed with a room than I was with that one. I wasn’t even sorry to be left alone in it for a while. It was tight and quiet and good smelling, a contrast to the big, drafty, echoing rooms I lived in with my father. Here each sound had only a moment’s life before it disappeared into the carpet or the tall shelves full of heavy books. There was a stone fireplace along one wall, its polished wooden mantel lined with photographs. The majority of them were pictures of a young Mrs. Ward with a very slender older man who reminded me a little of the photographs of my grandfather my mother was always showing me when I was a little boy. I have examined these since, and the two men could not have looked more dissimilar, except for their exaggerated slenderness and a rather peculiarly erect carriage. But there was an uncanny resemblance between the young Mrs. Ward of the photographs and her daughter Tria, and I examined each photo for clues to the mother’s transformation from young woman to mummy. There appeared to be no transition, however. In girlhood Mrs. Ward had been light, small, lovely, like Tria, though more pale; then suddenly she was a woman standing there beside the same man, who had appeared not to have aged at all, though his daughter had shrunken in upon herself. There were also pictures of Tria as a little girl, with those same anxious eyes, perched uncomfortably on her grandfather’s lap. Jack Ward himself wasn’t pictured anywhere.

  Next to the stone fireplace was a bookcase unlike the others in that one whole shelf was empty except for a thick, leather-bound volume on a stand, opened to the middle, like the big dictionary in the Mohawk Free Library. At the top of each manuscript page was typed, in gray fading letters, “The History of Mohawk County,” just to the right of the author’s name—William Henry Smythe. Since there was nobody to tell me I shouldn’t, I leafed through the brittle pages, discovering that there were nearly seven hundred, all in the same fading gray type. The manuscript was flanked by two red candles in squat gold holders, and the whole arrangement reminded me of the Monsignor’s altar at Our Lady of Sorrows.

  As I took all of this in, I became vaguely aware of voices in a remote part of the house. I had been alone in the room for quite some time, and when I opened the door and poked my head out into the dining room to see if anyone was around, the voices were louder. I recognized them as belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Ward, and they were coming from the bedroom farthest down the long corridor. Nearer me, halfway down the hall, the door Tria had disappeared behind was partially ajar, and it moved almost imperceptibly as I watched. When the voices stopped, it closed.

  It took me a while to make it back down the road through the pitch-black trees, arms out in front of me like a blind man, with just the sound of the highway below and the feel of the blacktop to go by. I emerged from the trees just as a car pulled up and let my father out by the convertible. “What a crazy son of a bitch,” he said when I got in. He was referring to Drew Littler, of course, but for a moment I thought maybe he meant me for still being right where he’d left me.

  22

  Among my entrepreneurial activities that summer, I salvaged golf balls from the narrow pond that served as a hazard on the thirteenth and fourteenth holes of the Mohawk Country Club. To judge from its location, you wouldn’t have thought it would come into play on either hole, since each offered a wide fairway and every opportunity to go around the water, but I doubted it could have attracted more balls had it been twice as large and right in front of the green. The more people faced away from the water, stared off into the friendly fairway, the more surely their ball would be destined for the pond. One afternoon before it had occurred to me that I might retrieve the balls that were down there, I sat on my bike for three hours and charted in my mind where the tee shots dropped, growing more and more amazed at the dense concentration of shots that ended up in the small strip of water. It was enough to make you reconsider the wisdom of deciding, on the outset of any human endeavor, that there was this one thing you didn’t want to do.

  The country club raked the pond on Tuesday nights, reselling the dredged-up balls as “used” the following week, priced according to the size and ugliness of the sneers cut into their dimpled skins. Many were aerodynamically suspect, but perfectly acceptable as “water balls.” People stocked up on them at fifteen cents apiece and seemed almost happy to give them back to the pond. It was easy to bid farewell to a yellowed ball that smiled up at you from the tee.

  Since the club conducted its weekly salvage on Tuesdays, I did mine on Mondays, sneaking onto the course around sundown, my gym bag stuffed with mask, snorkel, and flippers, all borrowed from the sporting goods department at Klein’s. I also had a fishing net on a long pole, courtesy of Wussy, who’d jumped to the understandable conclusion that I’d be fishing for fish.

  Dusk was not the ideal time of day to snorkel for golf balls, the low slanting rays of the sun producing only vague, ghostly light in the murky pond. Few balls on the weedy bottom showed up until I was right on top of them. Often they would not look like golf balls at all, but rather like brown boils in the sand. They hit the bottom with the force of a small explosion, burrowing out for themselves a small cavity in the silt, which would rise, then filter back down, covering the ball with a thin brown skin. I actually observed the process one evening when an errant tee shot narrowly missed me. As a rule I wouldn’t ease myself into the pond until I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t be interrupted. Mondays were usually slow, and I never started work until the fading light made golf impractical. I always checked out the two preceding holes before stripping down to my trunks and donning my snorkel.

  On a good night I’d retrieve enough balls to fill Wussy’s net at least once, though I was careful not to overfish the pond. I always left enough for the club’s Tuesday night raking to avoid undue suspicion, though there must have been some anyway, especially when I set up shop just outside the club’s main gate on Saturday mornings, underselling the pro shop markedly. My most expensive balls—unblemished Top-Flites and Titleists—I sold for thirty-five cents. Others I took what I could get for, learning the fine art of haggling with the drivers of shiny new cars who would pull off to the side and inspect my carefully arranged assortment, often grumbling over the quality of my eight-for-a-dollar specials and intimating that they might report my activities to the club management if I didn’t throw in this or that sliced one as a gesture of goodwill, in as much as the buyer recognized it as his own to begin with, lost the previous week. I always gave in, often pretending that I was being cruelly taken advantage of, confident that come Monday evening the grinning Ben Hogan number 7 would be mine once more, and once again for sale.

  Within a few weeks I was doing so well with this new enterprise that I could afford to cut in an associate, though I wouldn’t have done this had I not been scared into it. The bottom of the pond was spooky enough, even under normal circumstances. Skimming among the weeds, my mask mere inches from the inky bottom, my fins stirring up black muck behind me, I didn’t depend on sight that much because experience taught me where the balls congregated, the result of trajectory and the subtleties of underwater physics. A blind kid could have gathered them, which was good, because that was what I was in the parts of the pond nearest the bank where the grass grew tall and the long shadows of the trees bordering the fairways darkened the surface. I quickly became a proficient snorkeler, able to stay down over a minute at a time, then rising gently, just the snorkel itself breaking the smooth surface of the pond, releasing the rubber ball to let the air in. Inevitably, some of the pond’s brackish water got into the tube, but I learned to expel it without swallowing too much. Its taste was vile all the same and the duration of my scavenging was determined as much by my ability to endure that sour taste
as by false or fading light or fear of discovery.

  One evening, my net heavy with my dimpled catch, I became conscious of having stayed in the pond longer than usual. One of the things I worried about was forgetting about the time and coming up out of the pond to pitch darkness, disoriented and unable to locate my bike, which I always hid in the woods. Twice I had nearly lingered too long and had located my gear by pure chance in the darkness. The days were getting shorter now, and I was suddenly certain that I had stayed in the pond too long and that when I broke the surface it would be into an even darker darkness. When I pushed hard toward the surface, my snorkel was suddenly jammed down and wrenched out of my mouth, as if by a large hand. Almost simultaneously my head rammed something so hard and unyielding that it sent shivers of pain to the base of my neck and shoulders. The shock drove the air from my straining lungs in an explosion of frantic bubbles.

  My first conclusion was that I had somehow become confused about which direction was up, that I had propelled myself into the bank of the pond. This did not square with the direction my escaping air bubbles were taking, however, which was the same direction I had tried to go. Surely they knew which direction was up. How was it, then, that the ground came to be above me? There could be no doubt that it was the ground, especially after my second desperate lunge, this time with my arms extended before me, my hands encountering a solid wall of dense clay. At that moment it seemed that there was only one certainty in the entire world—that I was about to die. Somehow, I had become the victim of the cruelest hoax ever played on mortal man. Each direction I turned I encountered that smooth hard clay which became for me that instant “down.” There simply was no “up,” and up was the only direction that would do me any good. And though it seems odd now that it should have occurred to me at the time, I remember distinctly the terrible feeling that I had been in precisely the same situation before, that first week after going to live with my father when I’d been trapped in the basement beneath Klein’s. Then too my first reaction had been surprise, then panic, then an attempt at calm rationality. There had to be a button that would open the elevator door. To admit that maybe there wasn’t was to admit the possibility of an irrational universe.

  But in the basement of Klein’s I had been able to breathe and with each terrified breath assure myself that though I could see no way out, in time I would be rescued. Now I had neither time nor air, and so of course I would die. And it would be my fault. Because even though everything had suddenly become irrational, there was a dark shape, a message even, to its insanity. I was about to die because I had not learned my lesson. I had gotten myself into another dark place, and this time no door would open, my father would not appear, no hand would yank me into light and air for the simple reason that there was no up. At least not for me.

  And the truth is that if I’d had to figure it out in order to survive, I would have died there in that narrow black cave beneath the bank of the pond. I hadn’t the presence of mind to solve the riddle, to see that if I’d swum into a situation where there was no up that the only solution was to back out. When forward, right, left, up, and down all yielded the same result, I simply gave up, shoving in blind rage against the earth before me, furious with it even as I surrendered to it. I stopped kicking with my fins, accepted the brackish water into my lungs and felt gentle sleep coming.

  Then, miraculously, I was on the surface, my arms thrashing in the air, clawing, without any instruction from me, at the grassy bank. My last angry shove against mother earth, combined with my surrender and the end to my frantic webb-footed kicking, had floated me back out of the cave and into the world.

  I was alive.

  Willie Heinz was the first person I tapped to act as sentinel, though he didn’t work out. For one thing, he was easily abstracted, and for another he was extremely stupid. Once I disappeared beneath the surface of the water, he forgot about me as completely as if I had never existed. While I was under, he amused himself by stoning jays that screamed obscenities down at us from the innermost branches of the dark fairway trees. Sometimes when I surfaced I’d see him tearing ass down the cart path throwing stones up into the dark limbs as fast as he could pick them up. He took all feathered insults with vicious good cheer, like a taunt from a friend on the other side of the schoolyard fence, and bore down on the offending chatterers with murderous, though wildly inaccurate, intent. The other obvious problem with Willie Heinz as a lookout was that he couldn’t swim, which meant that if I managed to get myself in trouble I was still on my own.

  His uselessness notwithstanding, I’d have been happy enough for his vague, distant company if he’d done no worse than stone jays. In the end though, we couldn’t agree on how to run the business. Willie Heinz was of the opinion that swimming in muck after lost golf balls was foolish when there were so many perfectly good ones right out there in the middle of the fairway. They sat right up in the dry grass and the people they belonged to were often two hundred yards away. Willie advocated allowing a foursome to hit, then collecting their drives while the players were still bagging their drivers and ribbing each other on the tee. There were several holes with doglegs and hills that provided excellent cover. You could dash out in the middle of the fairway, collect all four balls, and be back in the trees before a single pale blue golf hat appeared on the horizon. It was astonishing how long people would search up and down a wide open fairway, how willing they were to believe that all four shots had simply disappeared.

  I tried my best to reason with him, to explain that this outright theft was ultimately bad for business, that the men in the shiny cars who pulled over to buy water balls from us on Saturday mornings would not hesitate to turn us in if they ever suspected that they were buying fairway balls hit straight and true, but I could never get him to see it. What it came down to was my personal belief that the men in the pale blue hats should pay for their failures, whereas Willie Heinz perversely expected them to pay for their successes, a more radical philosophical position, the ramifications of which were scary to anybody who hadn’t entirely given up on the possibility of the odd success in life.

  So, much as I hated to, I had to let Willie go. And just in time, as it turned out. He was in business for himself only a few days when he fell victim to a classic error in judgment. Spying a party on the distant tee, he had positioned himself on the far side of a hill that all the players had to drive past and awaited their offerings. The first three hitters whistled shots out into the middle of the fairway within thirty or forty yards of each other. Patiently, Willie awaited the fourth crack of the driver, his signal to gather. When it didn’t come immediately, he did not alarm himself. The worst player in any foursome would be hitting last and often these took forever addressing the ball. He should have taken alarm though, because the party on the tee had just become a threesome after one of their number had proven too drunk to continue after a long lunch in the clubhouse at the end of the front nine. The remaining members of the foursome came over the hill not on foot but in two carts, both barreling flat-out in a race. When they cleared the rim of the hill the driver of the lead cart saw Willie Heinz in time to swerve, but the second, in the wake of the first and a tad slower for carrying two men, ran right over the boy as he struggled to his feet. The impact propelled one rider out of the cart. He inscribed a clean perfect arc and landed unhurt on his haunches in the fairway. The driver of the second cart was also pitched clear, leaving Willie alone with the vehicle, or rather pinioned underneath it. The paper bag he’d been using to collect balls had ruptured on impact and they now lay fanned out over the hill. “Motherfucker!” Willie Heinz bellowed from beneath the golf cart. “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker!”

  Claude wasn’t much of an improvement, though he was as faithful to me as any mutt you’d ever save from starvation. At his mother’s insistence, he wore turtleneck sweaters to hide the white scars left by the rope. Not that Claude wasn’t amenable. Since the afternoon he’d strung himself up from the ramada, he’d be
come amenable to everything. Mostly he just sat in front of the television, staring at it blankly, except for Ben Cartwright and Bonanza, which struck some kind of chord within him and sometimes made him cry. Otherwise, he did whatever his mother told him. If I came over to visit, he’d follow me out the door and down the street. In the old days, the first thing he would have done was trip me, or shove me in a snowbank, or declare a race after getting a good four-step running lead. Now he just heeled to my command, abstracted, vague about whatever was on our (my) agenda.

  The only thing that ever attracted his attention was a blue Thunderbird. Whenever he saw one, Claude would want to follow or, if it was parked, wait beside it. His father had bought a new one to replace the Pontiac station wagon just before his son’s attempted suicide and taken it with him when he abandoned them a week or so after the doctors assured him and Mrs. Schwartz that their son would live. It was a terrible irony that blue Thunderbirds were popular that year. I knew of at least three owned by people in Mohawk, and I always had a devil of a time convincing Claude when he spotted one parked that he shouldn’t wait there by the curb for his father to come out.

  Actually, Claude wasn’t that bad a sentinel. He stationed himself on the fairway edge of the pond where he could see well in both directions. When anyone approached the tee, he clapped two flat rocks together underwater, an unmistakable, sometimes earsplitting signal. Now and then he’d give the signal if he just got lonesome for me, or lost track of my bubbles, or thought I’d been down too long. He always looked enormously relieved when I surfaced, as if he suspected that I had been visiting the same dark place he had visited at the end of his rope. I think I may have been the only person he told about it, what it had felt like. It was spooky listening to him explain in half a dozen words with that hoarse whisper his voice had become. For some reason, I had not imagined that he had gone blind there, but he said he had, almost immediately, with his eyes wide open. Other than suffocation, he’d felt no sensation, except in his toes, as if, even in his semiconscious state, something in him remembered that his life depended on them. We never talked about why he had done it. I figured he’d say, if he felt like it, without provocation, the way he’d rolled down his turtleneck one day to show me. But he never did say anything about his reasons, as if these might be even more hideous than the livid white flesh.