The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  Apparently my father and Wussy had been working all afternoon in the hot sun, repairing the roof on Eileen Littler’s little house. Drew, naturally, hadn’t been around to help. Probably his mother had warned him to stay away, knowing that there was no way her son and my father could work on the same roof without one hurling the other off. And no doubt Drew had stayed away until he figured the job was done. He was every bit as lazy as my father accused him of being, and he wouldn’t have wanted to risk being taunted up onto the roof where he’d get tar on his hands and clothes and in his blond hair.

  And part of their getting it on that day wouldn’t have anything to do with Drew Littler at all, but rather the lingering effects of my father’s having had to work all day in the hot sun with Wussy. No doubt my father had talked Wussy into helping because Wussy knew a little bit about roofing the way he knew a little bit about everything. Unless I miss my guess, Wussy also knew a little bit more about it than did my father, whose opinion about such matters was always, “How fucking hard can it be?” It must have been some afternoon up there, the two of them finding out how hard it could be, the hot sun on their shoulders and reflecting up into their faces off the hot tar they hauled up to the roof in buckets. No doubt my father bulled his way through tasks that required finesse, Wussy shaking his head, concentrating fiercely on damage control, trying to kid my father out of the worst kinds of dumbness and getting called “you crazy black bastard” for his trouble. Eileen probably came out every half hour or so to stand in the middle of the driveway where she could see the two of them, listen to their tug of war, ask how it was going, to which Wussy would reply that the whole job would have been finished an hour ago if only he didn’t have no help. Then my father would call him variations on the black bastard theme, Eileen, safe on the ground below, pointing out the literal truth that—covered with tar as they were—anyone would have taken them for brothers.

  Sometime after she went inside the last time, Drew must have roared up on his new motorcycle, the first he’d owned since wrecking the other at the base of Jack Ward’s private road. I doubt he would have said anything to my father or Wussy, but he probably gave them a long arrogant smirk before going into the house. At the time he had some sort of job and a cheap third-floor flat on the west end, but he still showed up two or three times a day, mealtimes, according to my father, since he couldn’t cook and couldn’t afford to eat out. Usually his first stop, before saying hello to anybody, was at the refrigerator, where he’d grab the plastic gallon jug of milk and tip it upright over his mouth. According to my father he could down two quarts that way, his Adam’s apple bobbing rhythmically, machinelike.

  “Don’t be going down there,” Wussy would have warned when he saw my father heading for the ladder.

  “Who died and left you job foreman?”

  “All right, go down there, rockhead.”

  “There’s a six-pack of beer in the refrigerator and it’s for us. I know because I put it there. If he’s into it, I’m kicking his ass.”

  By the time my father got to the foot of the ladder, Drew had emerged from the house and gone into the garage, where my father found him sucking on a beer.

  Probably my father gave him the opportunity to put it back. Probably Drew Littler didn’t see much point in returning a half-guzzled beer. My father would have explained that this wasn’t the point. The point was it was his beer. The point was he’d been up on the roof all afternoon in the hot sun. The point was they could have used some help. The point was Drew Littler was a worthless cocksucker who didn’t know how to do anything except sponge off his mother and get into trouble. This last point I’m sure he explained to Drew Littler, because he always explained it thoroughly to me when he got going on the subject of Eileen’s son. According to Wussy, Eileen came out and tried to keep them apart, but she didn’t get there soon enough, and Wussy apparently didn’t even come down off the roof. He told me all he could see was my father’s legs dangling about eight inches off the garage floor, going like crazy, as if they were pedaling an invisible bicycle. Drew apparently had him by the throat with one big paw and was squeezing as if he intended to burst my father’s purple face like a grape. Instead, he bashed him in the skull with the half-drunk can of beer and dropped him onto the cold floor. Then Drew Littler got on his motorcycle and roared off.

  If my father thought he’d had it rough with Drew Littler, if he thought that sitting there on the cool garage floor, dazed and covered with beer and tar and sweat and blood from his nose, was as bad as things were going to get, he was mistaken, and he would have known that he was mistaken had he been able to focus on Eileen Littler’s face. Wussy had by then started down the ladder, but he caught a glimpse of her standing over my father and went right back up again. She stood there for a hell of a while; then he heard her mutter, “Good! Sit there!” before storming back into the house.

  Only when she was inside did Wussy climb down off the roof and sit down next to my father up against the wall of the garage.

  My father looked at him. “You didn’t get hurt up there on the roof did you?”

  “No, I’m the nuts,” Wussy said.

  “I’m glad,” my father said, fingering his nose to see if it felt broken.

  “I heard all the noise and figured you were kicking ass. I just come down to keep Eileen off of you.”

  “From now on, she can kiss my ass,” my father said, trying to get to his feet. In the process he kicked the still leaking aluminum can under the car. “At least he didn’t get to drink our beer, anyhow.”

  “What kind of beer’d you buy?” Wussy said.

  “What difference?” my father said, then bent at the waist to look under the car.

  “Don’t be looking under there, just tell me what you bought.”

  “How the hell do I know,” my father said, but his expression had changed.

  “You usually buy Genesee,” Wussy said. “You just got brained with a Budweiser.”

  “So I bought Budweiser, so what?”

  “So when Eileen came back from the store an hour ago she had a six-pack of Budweiser. That’s so what.”

  My father wiped his face on his sleeve. “The principle’s the same. When was the last time he ever brought a six-pack of beer over here? When was the last time he bought a loaf of bread? A slice of bread?”

  Wussy was grinning at him now, watching him get worked up all over again, even more righteously now that he suspected he’d fucked up.

  “So,” my father said. “It’s my fault, I suppose. All afternoon in the sun fixing her fucking roof, and I’m not supposed to tell him to stay out of the fucking beer. Right?”

  He honked some blood onto the floor of the garage, used his sleeve. “Right? It’s my fault. That’s how come she sides with him. And that’s not crazy enough, you’re on her side.”

  “Nope,” Wussy said. “I’m on your side. But I’m going back up on the roof anyways.”

  “Good,” my father said. “Go.”

  According to Wussy he could hear them going at it down there right through the roof. Then a pot or something hit the wall and the back door slammed and my father climbed up the ladder, blasting away at the rate of about three curses per rung. When he arrived he started flinging everything he could lay a hand to off the roof, a few shingles and scraps of tar paper at first, but those were hardly satisfying the way the breeze took them. Then he threw hammers and other tools. Finally, he grabbed the tar bucket by the handle and flung it as hard as he could. Wussy figured it was his intention to throw it clean over the roof of the garage, but it only traveled ten feet before hitting a telephone wire and dropping straight down onto the hood of his convertible. My father walked over to the edge of the gently sloped roof and looked.

  “Go ahead,” Wussy said. “Jump.”

  Instead, my father turned his attention to the remaining rolls of tar paper, which he tossed down into the open car. These were followed by cartons of shingles and a box of black tacks. Then both mops and
assorted little shit that had accumulated during the long afternoon—plastic glasses, the lemonade pitcher, a couple of shirts. He threw all of these down into the convertible, and stopped when there was nothing left to throw off except Wussy. Eileen came back out just in time to see him kick the ladder, which hit the convertible at the steering wheel and ended up balancing perfectly, four to five feet on either side of the car. Wings.

  Eileen went back in the house.

  “Fuck it,” my father said.

  It took him a while, but he finally calmed down, and when he did, Wussy said his first words since the tirade began. “One of us is going to have to jump down off this roof,” he suggested. “It’s not so far in the back, and it’s a grassy landing.”

  “Shit,” my father said, peering over. “How come you never stop me when I get like that?”

  Wussy just looked at him.

  “Right,” my father said, disappearing over the side with a thud and a grunt.

  It took them half an hour to get going again, set the ladder back up, shoulder the tar paper back and shingles back topside. Another forty-five minutes to finish.

  Then they drove off without a word to Eileen and my father hadn’t been back in the year and a half before my return to Mohawk, even though later that same week Drew Littler was arrested for breaking and entering and sent to jail. “She’ll kiss my ass before I ever set foot in that house again,” he predicted on their way to the junkyard for a new hood. They had to settle for a white one, which was okay by my father. More annoying was the fact that a year later he and Wussy were still finding roofing tacks. Finding them the hard way.

  I think I was the only one concerned about my father that summer. Eileen, who had been worried enough to call me in Tucson, seemed to think he was doing better now. So did Mike, who had seen him at his worst and just about given up on him. But now he was back at work and not worrying about money, and somebody had said that the parents of the girl who’d been hurt in the accident were talking about putting it all behind them and settling out of court. They lived in a ratty trailer on the lake road and the idea of a lump sum right now as opposed to a much larger lump at some indefinite point in the future was growing on them. Thus my father’s prediction that the case would never go to court, which I had taken for bravado, seemed less farfetched. Even F. William Peterson, who refused to discuss the case at all in my mother’s presence, and only vaguely when we had a rare moment alone, seemed optimistic, claiming that other factors had come to light and these were in my father’s favor also. Whatever they were, he didn’t want them getting out, and I’m sure he had communicated nothing to my father. Of course my father’s driver’s license was going to stay good and suspended, except for his drive-to-work privileges, but he’d already adjusted to that by tightening his social circle to the in-town gin mills—Mike’s and the Night Owl and Greenie’s and the VFW and one or two other spots, each only a few blocks from the others and from his flat and thus not very far to drive. You couldn’t really even call it driving, he maintained. If he came out and smelled Angelo, he’d walk.

  He still had the same built-in radar where cops were concerned that had allowed him to torment my mother when I was a little boy, then disappear mere seconds before the cruiser careened around the corner. That radar occasionally failed him now, especially beyond a certain point of drunkenness. Otherwise, he was astonishing. “If I was a cop,” he would sometimes say as we were barreling along, “I’d park my ass right over there.” If I was driving, I’d slow down and look where he was pointing, and sure enough, there underneath the overpass, or behind a stand of trees, or in an alley there’d be a black-and-white, radar gun poised. If there was nobody behind us, he’d instruct me to slow down to about twenty so we could wave to the cop. If the top was up, he’d yell, “Hello, cocksucker!”, convinced that all cops were lip-readers but that lip-read testimony was inadmissible in court. They couldn’t do shit, the pricks, whether they wanted to or not.

  I’d just look at him.

  “You don’t believe me?” he’d say.

  “Nobody believes you.”

  “I’m right, anyhow.”

  It was undeniable that my father was in better spirits since going back to work. Maybe there was no reason to worry, but I did. Most everybody in Mohawk lived pretty near the edge—of unemployment, of lunacy, of bankruptcy, of potentially hazardous ignorance, of despair—and hence the local custom was that you only worried about people nearest the brink. Otherwise you’d worry yourself over the edge in short order, what with so many candidates for concern around. My father had taken a step or two back from the precipice and thereby removed himself from the official “at risk” roster. A month earlier you might have legitimately worried about him, but not anymore. Still, conventional wisdom aside, he didn’t seem quite right to me. He’d become oddly religious, at times quite certain that there was a God, and that this God had it in for Sam Hall. Always a gambler, he’d become obsessed with the laws of probability and was convinced that God was toying with him via the daily number.

  “Two-four-seven,” he’d say to Mike. “How long did I play two-four-seven?”

  “Who the fuck knows?” Mike would say. “Don’t start with this shit again.”

  If Wussy was seated on the next barstool, my father would nudge him. “How long did I play two-four-seven?”

  Wussy would shrug. “Thirty years. How should I know.”

  “Pretty goddamn near,” my father would say seriously. “Day after day after day. Two-four-seven. Two-four-seven.”

  “Right,” Mike said. “And it should have come up every day you played it.”

  My father was immune to sarcasm when on the trail of cosmic injustice. “Four-two-seven. Four-seven-two. Seven-two-four. Seven-four-two. Every combination but two-four-seven. No two-four-seven. Fuck me. I play it forever. Until I can’t take it anymore. I play three-seven-nine. Second week of three-seven-nine and guess what pops?”

  I had considered this a rhetorical question, but my father nudged me. “Guess,” he said.

  “I forget,” I told him. “What was your number?”

  “Two-four-seven.”

  “All right,” I said. “Two-four-seven.”

  “Right the first time,” he said, satisfied. “I bet it wasn’t ten days after I came off it. I bet it wasn’t a week.”

  “That’s one more bet you’d lose,” Mike said.

  “Your ass,” my father said. “Some guys get special treatment. Always have.”

  “God hates you?” I said in disbelief, the first time I heard this routine.

  “If he’s half as smart as they say, he’d damn near have to,” Wussy observed.

  “How would you explain it?” my father wanted to know. He was willing to defer to my opinion in such matters. I was a college graduate. If God wasn’t fucking him, I should be able to explain things.

  I said I didn’t have an explanation.

  He’d become something of a Calvinist, my father, contending that God had his mind pretty much made up from the beginning. Some people had it all right. Others? He lip-farted.

  “Take me and Jack Ward,” he said. “We both go into the service the same month, not a pot to piss in, neither one of us, we both go ashore at Utah Beach, we both end up in Berlin, we get home the same week. A year later he’s driving a new Lincoln Continental, loaded like a Greek, nothing to do but play golf every day. Now you tell me.”

  “Jack Ward’s dead,” I observed.

  He looked at me as if I might have an undetected brain tumor. “So?”

  I was embarrassed to state the obvious. “So his luck didn’t hold.”

  “You’re full of shit,” he said. “It held right to the end.”

  “Died in the saddle is what I heard,” somebody down the bar said.

  “You’re goddamn right,” my father said, standing up to demonstrate the proper rhythm for the saddle. A canter, I judged it to be. “He went right from the saddle into the loving arms of his maker. Nonstop.”r />
  “Probably d-driving around in a L-l-lincoln up there in heaven,” said Tree, who was much inclined toward my father’s theory of an Elect and a Damned.

  “Nah,” said the man down the bar. “He’s probably got a driver. He’s in the backseat getting you know what.” The speaker checked around the bar to see if there were any women.

  This led to a discussion of whether you-know-what was better in heaven. Somewhere in the proceedings, my father, who had instigated the whole thing, lost interest. As the voices rose in mock anger and comic disagreement over what it had to feel like to get balled in heaven, my father, as I had noticed him do repeatedly that summer when he thought no one was looking, stared at the crooked stump of his thumb, as if the black, callused digit he’d lost contained some magic he despaired of finding anywhere else beneath the sky.

  35

  A few days after I served Manhattans to Mrs. Agajanian, Claude’s old neighbor, who should come in off the street but Claude himself. It took me a minute to recognize him because his hair had receded and he’d become an adult instead of the soft, pudgy boy I remembered. In fact, it was worse than not recognizing him. I thought he was his father, for there was a striking resemblance between the man who stood before me and the pear-shaped Claude Sr., who’d blown town after his son’s attempted suicide. And when I blinked and said, “Claude Schwartz?” it was the father I thought I was speaking to. But then I saw the turtleneck and the strange mischief of expression, the same look that had been there as a boy when he had some believe-it-or-not item he wanted to share with me from his own personal Ripley’s. We shook as enthusiastically as we could with the bar between us, his large hand doughy, but warm and full of kindness. His grin was good-natured and wounded, suggesting that finding me here had made his day, even if I had been around for a month and a half and failed to look him up. Never mind, all was forgiven.