The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  So I wasn’t the least bit surprised to learn that the whole incident in the pool hall had its origins in Drew Littler’s inability to keep his game separate from the others. According to one eyewitness, Drew Littler had launched the cue ball with such velocity that it cleared the three adjacent tables and hit the skinny Negro kid at the base of the skull so neatly that everybody who hadn’t seen it happen concluded that the ball must have been thrown.

  “Cocksucker!” the kid said, rubbing the base of his neck.

  The significance of this expression was much discussed in the diner. Everybody agreed that the word was used, some claiming that it represented a personal observation, others suggesting that it betokened only the speaker’s general dissatisfaction with the turn of events. In either case, the fateful word was uttered, and several people heard it. The funny part was that Drew himself was not among those who heard. In fact, according to several eyewitnesses, when he approached the Negroes’ table, he was after nothing but the errant cue ball without which his own game could not continue. The Negro kid with the knot swelling on the back of his head had picked it up, and was inspecting the nearest tables, figuring one of them was minus a white ball. When Drew came up and demanded it, the kid handed it over, along with a dark look, and Drew returned to his own table without having offered an apology. He later claimed not to have known that the ball had actually hit anyone, and this may have been true.

  When Drew had returned to his own table, the Negro kids huddled together at one end of their table, their brows knit suspiciously, but too badly outnumbered to be more than indignant. The boy Drew hit let the others examine the base of his skull. All four were about sixteen, and after a few minutes they went back to shooting pool, though more carefully now, three watching the room in anticipation of another attack, while the fourth shot. Negroes, at least Negroes in groups, had never been welcome in the pool hall, but these boys apparently were determined to finish their rack so they could leave without the appearance of running away.

  By the time they were ready to go, at least two or three of the idle men who had been lounging around the snack bar had gone over to where Drew Littler was slapping balls around the table and had a word with him. When the Negroes left, Drew Littler said nothing, but watched them go. According to some, he had been drinking, but few picked up on a far more important detail. When the Negroes left the pool hall, they had the misfortune to be parked right out front. They were in a shiny, late-model car that one of the boys had borrowed from his father. And, when they got into the car, they made another mistake; they did not drive away. Rather, they held a caucus of some sort, allowing Drew Littler to pay for his table time and follow them outside. For some reason they did not drive away even when they saw him emerge from the pool hall with a cue stick in his hand. Perhaps it was because he came out alone and because there were four of them, and maybe because they thought they knew him. One of the boys turned out to be Wussy’s nephew, and he later said from his hospital bed that they all thought Drew Littler was coming over to say he was sorry.

  They were wrong. Without stopping for pleasantries, Drew Littler smashed one of the new car’s headlights with the cue stick and kicked a dent in the front door on the passenger side. Then he asked if anybody wanted to call him a cocksucker to his face. All four of the boys got out of the car and crowded around the dent, staring at it in disbelief. The boy who had borrowed the car from his father looked like he might cry. Staring at the damage, he said, “Cocksucker,” before he could think.

  The word was no sooner out than Drew hit the boy in the ribs with the cue, sending him to the sidewalk gasping for breath. By the time the fat cop on duty up the street at the Four Corners arrived on the scene, Drew had beaten all four boys so badly that each had to be taken to the emergency room. He had used one boy as a battering ram until he’d gone limp and then he’d taken the pool cue to the shiny car again. He was bashing the windshield when the cop arrived on the scene and told Drew Littler he’d better quit it right now before he got into serious trouble. Whereupon Drew told the cop to go fuck himself. This had the effect of subtly shifting the cop’s allegiances, and when Drew came around the car to have at the other side and made the mistake of turning his back, the cop coldcocked him with his nightstick and that was that.

  When Drew woke up, he was in jail and he had no idea that he was only part of that afternoon’s excitement in Mohawk. For at approximately the same time that he was administering a savage beating to the four Negro boys and their shiny car, Jack Ward was having a heart attack on the sixteenth hole of the Mohawk Country Club. Both ambulances had already been dispatched to the pool hall, where the attendants had their work cut out for them. By the time one of the two made it back across town to the country club, Jack Ward had been dead for twenty minutes.

  The best thing about my being something of a fixture at the Mohawk Grill was that my presence in the establishment lacked significance. To the men who gathered there in the late afternoon, I was at once ubiquitous and invisible, and they seldom took special care not to talk in front of me. Only the word “fuck” (and it had to be shouted) had the effect of making me real to them. They were the sort of men who said the word, then looked around to see who was there. “You didn’t hear that, Sam’s Kid,” they joked. (Only a few even remembered my name, and even they had picked up on Wussy’s nomenclature.) Sometimes Harry would grumble about the diner being “no place for a fuckin’ kid,” whereupon my father always wanted to know whose fault that was.

  Actually, since my father had cleaned me out, Harry was giving me more hours. My father had told him it was all right if I wanted them, and knowing my father, he probably figured he was in this fashion paying me back. Anyway, I worked Saturday mornings and early afternoons now, in addition to the hour and a half or so after school on days when enough dirty jobs had piled up. It wasn’t that long before I was back in the dough, and with the warmer weather coming I’d soon be starting up my golf ball business again. My father gave no indication of having located my new savings account, though I had to admit that this didn’t mean much, since he’d given no sign of locating the first one.

  At any rate, when Jack Ward had his heart attack, I was privy to the considerable discussion that the event occasioned. With the exception of my father, none of the men who frequented the Mohawk Grill had known Jack Ward personally, but they’d all seen him around and knew who he was and how much money he had, and so of course they were interested. In fact, Jack Ward’s death made religious mystics of them. The idea of it. If a guy that young and handsome and rich could just up and die like that, what the hell were any of them doing alive? After all, he hadn’t smoked, and they all did. Out at the Holiday Inn Jack Ward would order a Campari and soda and nurse it most of the night, while Harry’s crew was over at Greenie’s slamming down boilermakers. Jesus, Jack Ward never even gambled, and that was the official town vice, all the others being unofficial ones. So what in holy hell was he doing dead?

  Though he tried not to let on, I could tell that Jack Ward’s death did rattle my father. The two of them had gone ashore on Utah Beach and surprised the hell out of themselves by living through the war. You’d have had to know my father pretty well to guess just how rattled he was though, because he played Jack Ward’s death like he played Liars—flawlessly, boldly, arrogantly. When the circumstances of the tragedy became known, nobody got more mileage out of his former friend’s death than my father. For Jack Ward, it seemed, had had a busy day.

  He’d arrived at the Mohawk Country Club around eleven and teed off with a foursome who played for a buck a hole, allowed pushes on the odd-numbered holes, an arrangement that established a new bet, double in value, from that point forward. By the end of the front nine Jack Ward had won enough to pay for lunch at the clubhouse, which he did. It was early in the season and the May air had been damp, so there were no takers for the back nine. In fact, Jack Ward had pretty much decided to forgo them himself until he ran into the pretty fiancée of the cl
ub pro who wanted to play and had nobody to play with. Jack Ward thought that a shame.

  They teed off on number ten around two-thirty, just as the sun came out from behind the clouds, quickly drying the short fair-way grass and making the two golfers glad to be alive. They had the course to themselves. On the elevated tee of the fifteenth hole, which overlooked the preceding three, they must have seen just how alone they were. The sixteenth hole contained a sharp dogleg, and there they stopped near the edge of the trees.

  “That’s the w-w-way I want to go, all right,” Tree said, standing up on the rungs of his stool so he could demonstrate proper hip movement. “In the s-s-saddle.”

  As sad as I was for Jack Ward, the one I couldn’t stop thinking about was the girl. Not Tria, though I thought about her too, fatherless now in the big white house. But rather the girl Jack Ward had been with there at the edge of the woods. I kept wondering what I’d have done in her place, and how she must have felt. She would have had to go for help, of course, but even that couldn’t have been easy. Apparently, she’d started off in the wrong direction, disoriented by the winding fairways, surrounded by trees. She imagined she was heading for the clubhouse, only to discover when she emerged from the woods that she wasn’t. Disoriented, she decided to do the sensible thing. Instead of guessing where the clubhouse was, she followed the fairways—first fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen, then eighteen, the green of which lay some twenty yards from the canopied terrace of the clubhouse. The first person to see her puffing up the long approach was her fiancé, who had just finished giving the lesson that had prevented him from playing with her to begin with. He hopped in a cart and headed out to meet her. By now the young woman was completely awash in guilt and utterly inarticulate, and the two of them headed back in the cart the way she had come. By the time they arrived back on the scene, Jack Ward, now in the fetal position, his splendid white trousers still down around his ankles, was struggling with his last breaths, his face gray, but remarkably calm, his longish hair in rakish disarray.

  Together, his two rescuers did the best they could with his pants and loaded him onto the golf cart. Then, since there was room for only two, the club pro again headed for the clubhouse, Jack Ward slumped up against him, leaving the girl to follow with Jack’s clubs over one shoulder, her own over the other. The full force of the tragedy, along with its attendant embarrassment, must have come home to the young woman somewhere along the long fairway of the par-five seventeenth, because the two sets of bags were later discovered leaning up against the ball washer on the eighteenth tee. From there she must have been able to see the assembled crowd on the clubhouse terrace and the tardy ambulance pulling in, and the whole sordid mess must have seemed more than she could contemplate.

  In all the excitement it was nearly forty-five minutes before her fiancé realized that she had not returned to the clubhouse, and even longer before he discovered that her car was no longer in the parking lot. And by the time things calmed down enough so that he could go over to her apartment and ask her just what the hell … she had thrown her clothes into the back of her Dodge Dart and departed Mohawk only three months after moving there. She was never seen again.

  Now, so many years after the fact, it is possible for me to see the dark comedy of these events, but at the time I saw nothing amusing about Jack Ward’s tragic end. True, he had been little enough to me. I’d been in the man’s company only briefly and had spoken no more than a dozen words to him. Still, the fact that the details of his death should be the subject of lewd conversation at the Mohawk Grill and Greenie’s Tavern and the pool hall, not to mention the Mohawk Country Club, The Elms, and virtually every other public place, seemed to me criminal. When the men of the Mohawk Grill joked about Jack Ward dying in the saddle, I felt a strong homicidal impulse and I’d have erased the lot of them from the face of the earth had it been within my power.

  More than anything, though, the news of Jack Ward’s death made me want to find some dark and solitary place as far from my father and the men of the Mohawk Grill as I could get to reconsider the shape of things. For some reason, I settled on Our Lady of Sorrows, whose precincts I had not visited in several years. The church had not changed, though it was smaller than I remembered. My sign of the cross at the holy water font still felt natural, though I had not made one since moving in with my father, and anyone who saw my genuflection before slipping into one of the back pews wouldn’t have guessed how long it had been since my last. There was no one to see it though. Inside the church, it was just me and the late afternoon sun, barely strong enough to color the stained glass window along the upper story of the church. Everything below was lost in the general murk.

  Up on the main altar, Jesus was visible, thanks to the glow of the two red EXIT signs, which marked the sacristy side entrances and which stayed on even when electricity was cut to the lamps and chandeliers. The long low altar rail reminded me that once I had served at mass and that nobody had questioned my exhalted status, the appropriateness of my attendance upon the holiest rites, my bearing witness to the mysteries of the tabernacle.

  But surely the tabernacle had contained no mystery as profound as the death of Jack Ward. After all, you didn’t need a crystal ball to predict what was going to happen to Jesus. The way he’d gone about things it would have been a miracle if he hadn’t been crucified, it seemed to me. The empty tomb? Was that a mystery? The empty tabernacle I’d so often glimpsed over the shoulder of the old Monsignor? Its contents a mystery? Maybe, but not nearly so curious as the mystery of how anybody could be Jack Ward and not live happily ever after. His death made me realize that despite living through the war, marrying a rich woman, fathering a beautiful daughter, living in the white jewel house, driving the big Lincoln, and dying in the saddle, Jack Ward had not been happy. I was suddenly positive of it, despite the equal certainty of my father’s cronies that his final moments had been, like the rest of his existence, bliss. I remembered the afternoon he took me into the library of the Ward house, the way he looked around as if he’d forgotten what all was in there, if he’d ever known. How little pleasure he had derived from taking inventory. It hadn’t occurred to me then, but when I thought back on it, the way he’d come into the house from the outside, hesitating in the foyer, the crossroads of his own house, his daughter having disappeared down one long corridor, his wife out of sight somewhere, a strange boy peering out at him from the kitchen, he’d looked like a man returning to a place he’d visited long ago, having in the meantime forgotten the floor plan, the location of the room he’d once slept in, occupied now, surely, by somebody else. Not one of the books in that library had been his, nor had he ever turned down a page of one of them to mark his place.

  And now he was dead, his legacy the lewd account circulating about his last living act and how it had taken three men to unbend him sufficiently to get his shorts and grass-stained trousers back over his narrow hips before his wife arrived at the country club. Now that, all of it, was a mystery worth pondering, and I thought about it for an hour or so in the sweet darkness of Our Lady of Sorrows without coming to any conclusions, but feeling a little better anyhow. By the time I decided I’d better go home, what little color there had been was now drained out of the stained-glass windows, and if it hadn’t been for the red EXIT sign above the vestibule door, I doubt I would have been able to find my way.

  Outside, it was only slightly less dark, but from the church steps I was able to make out a figure coming down the middle of the street full tilt. It was Willie Heinz, and when he saw me he grinned and waved before I had a chance to step back into the shadows beneath the arched doorway. I thought about trying to catch him so I could ask if it was true about him and Drew Littler stealing cars and parking them in the river. But Willie was too fleet to catch once he had a running start, and he’d no sooner blown by me and made a sharp turn down an alley than a police car, tires squealing, flew down the street in pursuit, missing the turn Willie had made. They didn’t know he always
doubled back. I waited a few minutes before emerging from the shadows and heading home on my bike.

  I had come to a conclusion after all. Life was a crapshoot, and it didn’t pay to be mistaken for Willie Heinz.

  Late the next afternoon the busiest stretch of road in the county was the small winding one that led from the highway up through the trees to the Ward house. We crawled up the incline even slower than Tria had done on the afternoon Drew totaled his motorcycle. My father swore every time the brake lights on the car in front of us flashed red. To make matters worse, Eileen was with us and it looked now like she would be late for work at The Elms.

  “What the hell difference does it make,” my father said. “Everybody in Mohawk County is right here. If Irma’s got more than three tables I’ll eat your—” he’d crept up on the bumper of the car in front of him, then had to brake hard and blare the horn.