The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  When I spotted Robert and Anita Crane on the other side of the clubhouse, I went over and said hello. I liked talking to Anita, and I hoped Robert would intuit my situation and beg me to take the money he’d offered earlier. “Fuck me,” he said when I walked up, tearing several tickets in half and tossing them over his big shoulder. Not a good sign.

  Anita’s attention was divided between Robert, the big tote board on the track’s center island, and the legal pad attached to her clipboard. A Marlboro dangled from her pale lips. “I really hate it when he does that,” she said, referring to Robert’s torn tickets. “Unofficial it says up there big as life, and he’s got the tickets torn up already.”

  “He’s a jerk,” I agreed, though I shared Robert’s habit.

  “Only four f’ing dogs would have to be disqualified for those tickets to be winners,” Robert Crane said. “F’ing” was his one concession to Anita’s tenderness and breeding.

  “What do you know about Hawthorne?” Anita said to me.

  “The Unpardonable Sin,” I said. “You can screw up all your life and still get saved, provided you don’t think you’re better or worse than everybody else. English 102.”

  “Too clear,” she said. “How about this: ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne thought the unpardonable sin was one you couldn’t forgive. The important thing was don’t put people down, like in Goodman Brown.’ ”

  “There you go,” I said.

  “That’s the Hawthorne I knew and loved,” Robert agreed, then to me, “She speaks the language, doesn’t she?”

  “She does indeed.”

  “Bad night, amigo,” Robert said. “These particular dogs don’t seem to know who’s supposed to win.”

  “Blue Piniella,” I said.

  “Keep your voice down, for God’s sake,” Anita said.

  We watched the handlers parade the dogs to the post for the fourth race, and I took Robert’s chair when he went to get a bet down.

  “I hear you’re in the middle of a pretty amazing tailspin,” Anita said, not looking up from her legal pad.

  “These things happen,” I said, trying to affect world-weariness.

  “How bad is it?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “Something’s gotta give pretty soon, let’s put it that way.”

  I’d no sooner spoken the words than I felt a chill. It took me a minute to place them, to realize that I had summoned them from across a gulf of over a decade. It was that long since I’d seen my father. According to my mother he’d moved back to Mohawk, but she hadn’t seen him and didn’t know if it was true.

  “Robert says you’re trying to lose,” Anita said over the top of her reading glasses, and for some reason it pissed me off that she should say so. She herself looked like a cave dweller, her skin sallow, almost transparent, like a dusty moth’s wing. “He says you’re a classic case. He’s going to do a paper on you.” She raised her eyebrow significantly.

  Her husband came back then, so I surrendered his chair. “Who you got here?” he said.

  I told him I was letting this one alone.

  “Let them all alone and then you might have something, right?” he said.

  Anita made a face at him. “Do tell. What would you have?”

  “I have you,” Robert said, and I realized I had in fact stumbled into the middle of a marital spat. The subtlety of these things always surprised me. My father and mother had fought openly, their disagreements spilling out into the street or backyard. When married couples concealed their animosities in public, or tried to, it always threw me for a loop, and when the fourth race went off I was glad. I didn’t want to hear their next coded, civilized exchange.

  I also didn’t want to be the subject of Robert Crane’s thesis, so I strolled back to the little bar to mingle with the other desperate men who were waiting for some fucking thing to give. On my way I passed a table occupied by an affluent young couple who had gotten up and gone over to the rail to watch the race below under the yellow lights. It was probably their first time at the track and they’d left a twenty-dollar bill on the table. In all the commotion it would have been the easiest thing in a difficult world to lift it, put it down again on Blue Piniella’s sleak nose in the fifth, and slip the twenty back later in the evening after the dog won and paid off. The next easiest would be to wait for Robert Crane to get up from the table to place his bets and put the touch on him. I’d pay him back tomorrow after I sold the Galaxie if Blue Piniella found a way to lose.

  But I didn’t do any of those things. Despite having slept all afternoon I was suddenly exhausted. Too tired to steal, to borrow, to cheer a long shot, to care much whether some fucking thing gave or whether it didn’t. So I just stood there and watched the small monitor above the bar as Blue Piniella broke from the gate a head in front of the pack and ran like the wind, wire to wire. He was beautiful, and I thought about his pure need to run, all the way back to my car.

  When I got home, sure enough, the telephone was ringing. It was just like my mother to call and call, to stay up all night calling if need be. I decided to tell her I’d been home the whole time and working too intently to bother answering. Make her feel guilty about interrupting. “Yes, what is it, for heaven’s sake?” I said into the receiver.

  “Ned?” the voice was female, distant and unrecognizable on the fuzzy long distance line. A Mohawk voice, but not my mother’s. “Ned Hall?”

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “This is Ned, isn’t it?” A pause. “I wouldn’t have called except it’s important,” Eileen Littler assured me. “It’s about Sam … your father.”

  30

  I tried my best, all the way across country, but it was hard to imagine my father a drunk. But then it was hard to imagine my father.

  Ten years was a long time. I hadn’t seen him since the late spring afternoon he and Wussy had delivered the pool table. I’d been fourteen then, and I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize him. My first night on the bus—we must have been somewhere in New Mexico—I dreamed that when I arrived in Mohawk, a toothless, feeble old man with a cloud of gray hair was there to meet me at the Four Corners. When I stepped off the bus, he croaked, “Ned? Ned my boy?” and I pushed him away angrily, my own father. The dream had been so spooky it got me trying to calculate how old he was, so I wouldn’t be surprised. I figured he had to be between forty-five and fifty. That was as close as I could get.

  Eileen hadn’t gone into detail. She said she’d called because she was wondering whether I had any plans to visit my mother once school was out (How had she known that I was in school and where?), because if I was, I should look my father up, because his life wasn’t so hot right now and because maybe a visit from his college graduate son would buck him up. “You don’t have long hair, do you?” she added.

  “Not very,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Long hair’s one of the things that’s got him bent out of whack, or so I’m told.”

  They themselves were on the outs, at least from what I could gather. I was to forget this call, in fact. There wasn’t much she could do with him anymore, not that she ever had been able to do that much. Hadn’t my mother written about him?

  I said no, not a word, which struck her as odd and me as normal. According to Eileen, he’d been arrested no fewer than five times in the last two years, his drunken exploits fully chronicled in the Mohawk Republican, a newspaper that she seemed surprised to discover was not routinely for sale at newsstands in Tucson, Arizona. Was I sure I hadn’t heard a thing?

  For some reason, again according to Eileen, in the most advanced stages of his drunkenness he would recall that he had a son who was a college graduate and then he’d start talking about me to anybody who’d listen. People were getting tired of it. I said I could understand that.

  We left it that I’d think about paying a visit in a couple of months, but by the time I hung up I’d decided to leave for Mohawk in the morning. There was nothing keeping me in Tucson, I realized. Certainly not the do
ctoral degree I’d begun to lose interest in the moment the draft lottery had freed me to pursue it. My landlord would be pissed if I bolted midterm, but he’d keep my deposit and sell my few sticks of furniture to make himself feel better. And he’d long coveted my tree stump. So, I threw my clothes into my grandfather’s old navy duffel bag, and in the morning I drove the Galaxie down to a used car lot across from the Greyhound terminal. I told a man wearing a sport coat that was shinier than any of the cars on his tiny lot that I could let him have the Ford for three hundred dollars. We settled on eighty-five, with which I purchased a See America special fare ticket. There was almost twenty dollars left over, which meant that I’d be able to eat during the three-day trip, at least occasionally.

  In Albany, I had to change buses for the short trip further upstate to Mohawk. I had a few fellow passengers to begin with, but the last of them got off in Amsterdam, leaving the big bus to its driver and me. I stayed where I was, halfway down the aisle, and watched the cold spring rain through the dirty window. The countryside was already lush and everywhere green, except where tilting rusted billboards interrupted the landscape, last season’s advertisements for bankrupt businesses peeling down in strips. The constant sunshine of the Southwest, so full of false optimism, had often depressed me, and it occurred to me, as I sat there in the straining bus as it lumbered up Fonda Hill toward Mohawk, that I had solved the problem of excess optimism, anyway. It was the kind of gray late afternoon that promised dusk within minutes, but wouldn’t make good for three hours. That was fine with me. I was in no hurry.

  When the bus pulled up in front of the cigar store on the Four Corners and I was handed my duffel bag, I realized I didn’t know what to do next. Main Street was virtually deserted after business hours, and sad-looking too, the emptiness of it, compared to the downtown of my childhood. From the Four Corners I could see that several more buildings had come down, including the movie theater and the old City Hall where my father had on numerous occasions spent the night. With so many gray buildings gone, the town resembled a Hollywood back lot. In the gaps between buildings you could see things that weren’t supposed to be visible from the street—dirty side entrances to shops that kept up halfway decent appearances out front, full garbage dumpsters awaiting trash collection, a car or two on blocks—things that would have been secrets had the buildings along Main formed an unbroken line. No doubt the back alleys of every town were more or less the same, but it seemed a shame the town should be so transparent. Like people, communities deserved a facade, however flimsy. The old SHOP DOWNTOWN MOHAWK, Where There’s Always Plenty of Parking sign had faded into the bricks of the wall it had been painted on, and people must have seen the irony and just let it go. Since I didn’t know where my father was living, it made sense to go see my mother, who would surely take it as a betrayal if she discovered I’d gone someplace else first. Trouble was, I didn’t feel up to confronting her quite yet and besides, just walking in on her without warning with my longish hair and four-day beard might knock her for a hell of a loop.

  There was a phone booth in front of the Mohawk Trust, so I shouldered my duffel bag and made for that. It didn’t take me long to realize it would be useless. There was no listing for Sam Hall or Eileen Littler. My father had never had a phone. Eileen had always kept her number unlisted. I started to check on Wussy until, after a few moments of vague, dazed leafing, I remembered I didn’t know his last name. I had more or less the same problem with Skinny Donovan. There were about a dozen Donovans listed but, not surprisingly, no “Skinny.” (His real name—Patrick—I’d somehow forgotten.) It occurred to me as I stood outside the phone booth in the persistent drizzle that my knowledge of these people was incomplete, though this peculiar way of knowing—these nicknames, partial identities, aliases—represented standard commerce in Mohawk. Sign here, Tree.

  There was nothing to do but readjust my thinking, get back to local time and place. The clock above the Mohawk Trust flashed the former, and I synchronized my watch, which made me feel a little better. After all, I was a tough, worldly, steely-eyed twenty-four now, and college educated to boot. If I couldn’t locate my father in his own hometown, there was something wrong with me. The place to start was the Mohawk Grill.

  I never got there though. I hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps toward its buzzing neon sign, clearly audible in the late afternoon stillness, when a door opened between the Rooker Pharmacy and Lauria’s Men’s Wear and a large, well-dressed man stepped into the street, his back to me. He was in the act of struggling on with a new pair of leather gloves and I knew who it was before he even looked up.

  The door that locked shut behind him confirmed it: F. William Peterson, Attorney-at-Law, was one of the names listed there.

  When he looked up and saw me smiling at him, he gave me a curt nod and headed down the street in the direction I’d just come from. He got halfway to the bank before he stopped dead, stalled there for a second, then wheeled around. I’d stayed right where I was, duffel bag over my shoulder. “Ned?” he said.

  “Will?” I said.

  “Ned Hall?” He was coming toward me now, still tentatively, as if when he got there, he meant to touch my cheek to make sure I was real.

  “Pop?” I said, since the situation couldn’t have been much more absurd.

  He stopped right in front of me, his red face beaming. “Look at you,” he said, offering a gloved hand.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m looking at you.”

  Poor F. William Peterson never did have much of a handshake, and he still didn’t. Always soft, he was even softer now, a boneless roast of a man. He looked genuinely glad to see me as we shook, but then he stopped in midpump, his brow darkening. “You haven’t been home yet?”

  I told him I’d just that minute stepped off the bus.

  He looked up and down the deserted street then, as if to be sure we hadn’t been spotted. “Thank God,” he said. “Come with me.”

  A moment later we were upstairs in his second-floor office. We had the place to ourselves, half an hour past closing. Like the offices of many small-town lawyers, F. William Peterson’s could have passed for that of an insurance agent, with its cheap wood paneling and big metal desk.

  “I’d better call her,” he said, picking up the phone, motioning me to a chair by the window overlooking Main, one story lower and fifty yards closer to the Four Corners, but otherwise quite similar to the view I’d had from the Accounting Department. It occurred to me that if I wanted to find my father, the best plan might be to stay right were I was. He was almost sure to come strolling out of the pool hall or the Mohawk Grill or The Glove Tavern some time in the next twenty-four hours, his hands plunged deep into his pockets, rolling gently at the knees as he surveyed his domain.

  After he dialed, F. William Peterson swiveled in his chair so his back was to me. When my mother answered, he spoke softly, as if anticipating embarrassment. “Hi,” he said. That must have been all she let him get out, because he started to say something else, stopped abruptly, and just listened. “I know,” he said. “I know. Half an hour.”

  He swiveled around to make a face at me. His free hand went yap-yap-yap.

  “You know Fridays,” he said, when he sensed an opening. “Half an hour, the latest.”

  She must have hung up without saying goodbye, because he looked at the receiver as if they’d been disconnected. “What a woman,” he said, with red-faced cheer, and then, as if the two ideas were related, “Am I glad to see you!”

  “How is she?” I said. “Really.”

  I had spoken with him once or twice on the phone in the past few years, but my mother had always been there in the room with him, and of course her own protestations on the subject of her health I considered completely worthless.

  “Better!” he said. “Almost better! Almost completely better!”

  “That’s good,” I said, studying his performance.

  “Down to one pill a day,” he went on. “You won’t know her. S
ometimes, she even skips the one. Those are rough days, but …”

  Something about the way he said this last suggested that the rough days were rougher on him than her. “Remember how she couldn’t do anything at first? Couldn’t decide ketchup or mustard? You should see her go now.”

  “I’ll bet it’s something,” I said.

  “What you’ll want to do,” he said, “is call her. Tonight. Tell her you’re in Buffalo or someplace like that. Give her the night to get used to it. Then come by tomorrow. She’s a trooper about day-to-day stuff, but surprises throw her.”

  “All right,” I said, relieved.

  His expression darkened. “Seen your father?”

  Suddenly, something made sense that had been nagging at me. “You gave Eileen my number—”

  He nodded, reluctantly. “If I’d called and your mother’d found out—” he drew his index finger across his throat. “I didn’t want you to leave in the middle of the term though. Did that foolish woman tell you to come right away?”

  “No,” I said. “It sounded serious though.”

  “What did she tell you?” he was watching me carefully.

  “That he’s a drunk.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Charming woman, Eileen Littler. The soul of delicacy.”

  “Is it true?”

  F. William Peterson leaned back in his chair, exhaled through his nostrils. “His most pressing problem is more immediate. He was in an accident last fall on the lake road. A young girl in the other car ended up in the hospital. Damn near died. A goddamn miracle everybody wasn’t killed, including Sam. It was a head-on collision. The good news is the girl was driving illegally, at night, on a learner’s permit and probably speeding. Her boyfriend lied to the cops, said he was driving, but we know better. The bad news is Sam was legally DWI. We’ll push the hell out of mitigating circumstances, but—”