The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “Okay, that’s one.”

  “And at a restaurant, somewhere. You were with your father and he told a dirty joke.”

  “And I wanted to die,” I said.

  “I can’t remember the third time,” she finally admitted, her faint resemblance to her mother growing more pronounced when she frowned.

  Since the third was her father’s funeral, and since it didn’t count because we’d not actually spoken, I said I didn’t remember either.

  “Then how do you know there were three?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Maybe it was just two.”

  “Then there’s no way I can win the prize. You don’t play fair.”

  “I’m a scoundrel,” I conceded, mildly surprised that the “prize” concept had interested her.

  “Who’s a scoundrel?” said Mrs. Ward, who had materialized at my shoulder carrying three more goblets, these full of fresh fruits, half of them new to me, all diced into bite-sized chunks. “Nobody is capable of being a scoundrel on such a glorious day as this,” Mrs. Ward said. “Simply glorious.”

  I agreed. It was glorious.

  “The first day of the rest of our lives,” Mrs. Ward continued, seating herself in the third chair. “I heard that somewhere and it stuck in my mind. That’s the way to look at this old life.”

  “It certainly is,” I said.

  “See?” Mrs. Ward said to her daughter. “You’re the only gloomy-gus at the table.”

  “I’m not gloomy, Mother,” Tria said. “I’m simply a realist.”

  “A gloomy realist. Thank heavens Mr.… is not a gloomy realist, or we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our brunch.”

  We ate reverentially until Tria, as if to dispel the notion that she was gloomy, said that the kiwi was wonderful.

  “It certainly is,” I said, making a mental note not to use this phrase again for at least half an hour, and wondering which of the fruits I was eating might be the kiwi.

  There was a long moment then when we suddenly all seemed to realize that we might not be able to recapture the rhythm of normal conversation. We were on stage and somebody had missed a cue and now nobody knew whose turn it was to speak. Maybe the whole thing had been a bad idea, we all seemed to be thinking, as we dipped with renewed interest into our goblets, as if it were in the nature of kiwi and passion fruit to save us.

  “A glorious day to be alive,” Mrs. Ward finally offered.

  “It certainly is,” I said.

  There was much more to eat, Mrs. Ward assured us. No, she didn’t need any help to fetch it. Tria and I watched her patter into the house, and I wondered what had become of their ill-tempered cook.

  “How are you at saying no,” Tria said in a lowered voice, once we had the patio to ourselves.

  I said it depended on who I was saying no to, almost adding that I didn’t think I’d have much luck saying no to her.

  “Well, be prepared,” Tria said. “Because she’s working up to something.”

  “What?” I said, genuinely curious as to what I possessed that Mrs. Ward could possibly want.

  “I think I know, but I’m hoping I’m wrong,” she said. Then she reached across the table and touched my hand lightly, and only for a second. “Please don’t laugh at her though.”

  Actually, thanks to the mimosas, I was feeling extraordinarily tolerant. Exactly one month earlier I’d hit bottom in Tucson, making a complete mess of my graduate studies, gambling compulsively, suicidally. And I had simply walked away from the mess. Now, sitting pleasantly on the Wards’ charmed little patio, with just enough breeze to flutter the umbrella overhead, surrounded by Skinny Donovan’s fragrant flowers, and in the company of a young woman every bit as fresh and fragrant as the surrounding bloom, it seemed to me that life was extraordinarily forgiving. I felt lucky again and there was no Lanny Aguilar around to be pissed off by my good fortune. Vietnam itself seemed relegated to the television, without local ramification, as if a town that never got to participate in the good fortune of the fifties felt no need to suffer the tragedy of the seventies. I decided that as far as I was concerned, walking away was an underrated talent, probably genetic in origin. My father had written the book on walking away from things before I ever came along. Perhaps luck was his gift to me. If so, I was grateful. After all, I could just as easily have taken after my mother, who had never walked away from anything, who paid and paid, compound interest, the principal always outstanding. This legacy she herself had inherited from her own father, who had considered himself lucky to come home from the war riddled with malaria, to break even in the cold earth of Mohawk.

  I wondered what my grandfather, who had made his peace with ill fortune, who had accepted winter with a capital W as the essence of human existence, would have thought about me, with my 348, with the even luckier temperament that might well have allowed me to walk north into Canada or south into Mexico if I had failed in the luck of the draw. Maybe he’d have been happy for my disposition. I’d been told often enough that he had little use for my father, and it was reasonable to assume that he’d have had a fair number of reservations about me. But his life and thought had come to me filtered through my mother, so there was no way to tell for sure. Any more than there was a way to tell whether he had ever spent an enchanted afternoon such as this under a sun that promised summer with a capital S.

  It was not truly summer though, and when a white cloud obscured the sun, the air was suddenly chill and we were forced inside, leaving behind the petrified remains of our eggs in hollandaise sauce. The room we adjourned to was the small, book-lined study where Jack Ward had deposited me and from which the horrible frizzy-haired woman had stolen Gone with the Wind. The room was exactly as I remembered it, the large mantel and many of the shelves sporting photographs, including the one of a young Hilda Ward in the company of the distinguished-looking man with thinning hair, another of Tria, I presumed, balancing uncomfortably on this same man’s knee. There had been no photographic evidence of Jack Ward’s existence in the room ten years ago and there wasn’t any now.

  Tria watched me intently as her mother took down from the place of honor on the mantel the leatherbound volume that had attracted my attention as a boy. Mrs. Ward hesitated there at the altar before turning back to us, book in hand, and when she did her expression could only be described as religious. I half expected her to open the volume and begin to read aloud. Instead, she cleared her voice and said, “Mr. Hall. I wonder if you would be so good as to give us your professional opinion of this work. As an historian.”

  “Like I said—” I began.

  “And as a graduate of the university.” The book was between us now, occupying space that was neither the old woman’s nor mine. There was nothing I could do but reach out and take the book, and so when Tria nodded, I did. Even so, there was a moment when we both had a hold of the damned thing, and when I drew it toward me, as I imagined I was supposed to, I encountered resistance in the fierce old fingers that did not want to surrender it. They did though, eventually, causing us both a momentary loss of equilibrium.

  Once I had the volume—The History of Mohawk County from the Earliest Times to the Present, by William Henry Smythe—it occurred to me that I hadn’t any idea what I was supposed to do with it. The way we were all facing each other in the middle of the small room gave the impression that I was expected to read it standing up, beginning to end, and render a judgment as soon as I’d finished. It seemed Mrs. Ward’s clear intention was to stand there and watch me read it, gauging my opinion from the movement of my eyebrows. For this reason I was reluctant to open the volume, fearful of setting this chain of events in motion.

  “The author of this work of history is Tria’s grandfather on her mother’s side, you see. And my own father,” Mrs. Ward added, as if these two were not the same person, but rather collaborators. “What we are in urgent need of is an informed and objective opinion. I am convinced that what you hold in your hands is a work of historical significance, intelligence, and ref
inement, but, as my daughter has pointed out to me, I am hardly objective in this matter, you see.”

  “Certainly,” I said. “I mean, that’s entirely understandable.”

  “I could never allow the volume to leave this room, of course, but you could examine it here, at your leisure.”

  Tria was looking away now, flushed and beautiful.

  “I’m not really an historian,” I said again. “Of course I’d be very interested to have a look, but—”

  “Wonderful,” Mrs. Ward said. “You see dear? Help has arrived. I told you Mr.… was just the young man for us.”

  “I work days—” I began.

  “There is no deadline, you see,” Mrs. Ward said. “None. You would be welcome to visit us any evening. I have a project in mind, you see, but there are bridges to cross, and I am aware of each one, you see.”

  “Well—”

  “You will of course be compensated. We would not expect to engage the services of a graduate of the university without providing remuneration.”

  This last had the ring of a line too long practiced, too desperate. “I couldn’t take money—”

  “But you will read and give us your opinion.…” Mrs. Ward now held out her palms for the volume, as if it had already rested too long in the hands of a stranger, and I returned it to her, still unopened, her thin fingers closing around it like tiny vises.

  “Of course I will,” I reassured her, all the while thinking, I must confess, of the sweet promise of long evenings in conference with her dark-haired daughter. “Of course I will.”

  It was that dark-haired daughter who walked me out to F. William Peterson’s shiny New Yorker less than fifteen minutes later, the afternoon suddenly far shorter than I’d expected. The air had lost its warmth, and so had my companion, it seemed to me. I couldn’t make up my mind whether Tria Ward was irritated with me or simply abstracted.

  “I hope I didn’t mess up,” I said when we were out of earshot.

  She allowed herself a half smile. “No,” she said. “It isn’t that. With Mother, things are never easy. Encouraging and discouraging her can be equally hazardous. I warned you not to laugh. I should have also warned you not to take her too seriously.”

  “Right,” I said. “Then I’d have known just what to do.”

  She shrugged. “It’s my fault anyway. I’ve seen this coming and didn’t do anything about it. Now she’s all wound up and there will be no dealing with her. You may have to be honest before you’re through, and that will earn you an enemy.”

  “As long as it’s just the one,” I said, and she looked at me strangely, as if my remark would not permit interpretation. The blankness of her expression gave me a chill. It occurred to me for the first time in my long but slender acquaintance with Tria Ward that she might be slow. But I decided, as I stood there, completely charmed by the subtle flecks of color in her dark eyes, that it wasn’t true, and that it wouldn’t necessarily matter if it were. In the space of a few short hours, it occurred to me, I had fallen half in love with her again.

  At least half.

  34

  My father said little about the legal difficulties that were closing in on him. In fact, he maintained that the lawsuit pending against him would never come to trial. The insurance companies would settle out of court, and the criminal negligence charge resulting from the DWI would be dropped. Beyond the mandated insurance coverage he had from the assigned risk pool, he himself had nothing, and to his mind that rendered him judgment-proof. “What the hell do I have?” he kept insisting whenever anyone suggested he might be in trouble.

  He was willing to concede that the accident would plunge him even further into the very deepest, darkest recesses of the risk pool, making his already exorbitant insurance rates astronomical, but beyond that he couldn’t see where he had anything to lose. When I asked him whether there was a chance he might go to jail, he just shrugged. He’d been there before. And it couldn’t be for too long. He’d just have to make sure he served his time during the winter, which was his bad season anyhow. “I’m all right when I’m working,” he said. “If it wasn’t for winters I’d be governor.”

  In fact, he did seem to do better once he went back on the road. He’d usually wander into Mike’s Place about the time I got off and we’d have a beer before I headed home to dinner with my mother. Some nights he’d eat a hamburg steak at the Mohawk Grill or a plate of spaghetti at Mike’s, and then say he was going home. He almost never did, but I could tell he was too tired after the long day of road construction to get into much trouble. Occasionally he’d go home with the intention of showering and going out again, only to fall asleep on the sofa for a few hours, long enough to make the shortened night less dangerous. And when he stuck to beer he was okay. Shortly after my return, he started up with Eileen again, too, which I considered a good sign. “She’s a good girl,” he said. “She’s not the best-looking girl you ever saw, but she’s all right, just the same. We stay off the subject of her asshole kid … we do okay.”

  “What’s he up to these days?” I asked, feeling little more than obligatory curiosity, thankful that since my return to Mohawk our paths hadn’t crossed and a little fearful that inquiring after his health might have the unintended effect of producing Drew Littler in the flesh. My first week at Mike’s Place, I kept expecting him to turn up, especially when it turned out that Eileen was working lunches, but he never did. I’d often thought about asking her about him, but I knew he’d been in and out of trouble and a variety of institutions, so I thought. I’d spare her. Now I was glad.

  “Oh, he’s up to about here,” my father said, putting his maimed hand about a foot over his own head. “Like always. At the moment he’s the guest of the state. They caught him trying to break into some joint down the line about three in the morning, the dumb son of a bitch. He couldn’t work for a living, naturally.”

  “How long is he in for?”

  “Not near long enough,” my father said. “I got him a couple jobs myself, but things always wound up missing. It was never him, of course. Steal? Not him.”

  It didn’t take my father much to get revved up on the subject of Drew Littler, and when he recalled conversations they’d had, he always rendered these dramatically, playing both parts, capturing the rhythms of the original discussion.

  “Then how come as soon as you get hired things always start disappearing, I said to him one day. He’d just been fired, as usual. How the hell should I know, he says. Right. How the hell should you know anything, Zero. Things just vanish. They get up and walk away. As soon as you get hired, all this shit just up and walks off. It never did before you started working there, but now it just can’t stay put.”

  “You know what he says to me, the big dumb son of a bitch? He says, that’s right, Sammy. That’s fuckin’ right.”

  By this time my father was usually purple. One incident would remind him of another, and before long the veins in his neck would be pulsing. “We got into it about a year ago. He doesn’t say shit to me anymore. He’s that smart anyway, the dumb bastard.”

  “You can’t tell his mother he’s no good, either.” I could tell he was unable to stop himself now. “She knows. She’s got to. But do you think she’d listen when anybody tries to tell her? Not a chance. If he’s not stealing money out of her purse, she’s giving it to him so he won’t have to. Can you imagine stealing from your own mother?”

  I said no, but he wasn’t really talking to me. Drew Littler stories consumed him, and once he got started a listener wasn’t strictly necessary. He’d been through them all with Wussy and Mike and everybody else, and they never let him even get started anymore, cutting him off before he could get up a head of steam, for which he thanked them. Don’t get me started on that dumb son of a bitch.

  But I was a fresh listener, and I had to hear these stories several times during the course of the summer. It didn’t take me long to realize that Drew Littler had become almost larger than life (no small matter) with my
father, representing to him all that was wrong with things. It did little good to steer him away from the subject, because almost anything that went wrong would remind him of Eileen’s son and set him in motion. And it always ended the same way, with my father shaking his head, his eyes having narrowed to the point that they were more inward-looking than outward, as if for the first time in his life he’d come across something he couldn’t understand. “You should see him now,” he’d tell me. “He’s as big as a house.”

  And even though his eyes were little more than slits by the time he finished his rant, I could see something strange in them, something I’d never seen before.

  It took me months to piece together what had happened between them. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could just ask him about. My father had already told me all he was going to tell about how they’d “gotten into it.” If I asked, all he’d do was go through the whole thing again and I wouldn’t know any more than I had to begin with. You couldn’t focus my father’s stories, get him to clarify and expand portions. He’d start all over for you, but that was about it. So I had to make do with oblique references to the incident until I could get Wussy to fill me in. I still don’t know all the details, but the outline is pretty clear, the conflict and its outcome predictable.

  My father must have realized that he couldn’t keep Drew Littler buffaloed forever. Even that second year that I’d lived with my father, the boy had been far bigger and stronger, and he’d known he was, at some level that was not quite belief. But his knowledge was marching steadily in the direction of belief, and he must have awakened each morning with an iota less superstitious fear of the man who appeared to have his number. He must have felt that belief coming like a wave, must have known that the day was not far distant when none of my father’s tricks would work anymore, that there would be no way Sam Hall could get the drop on him. Or that even if he did get the drop, it wouldn’t do him any good. That afternoon they finally got into it, Drew Littler must have known, perhaps had known for some time, that he could spot my father just about any advantage and still come out on top.