The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  Knowing right where to plant the dagger is a special gift.

  Since Eileen was the one who had called, I figured my father was probably at Mike’s Place, but I was wrong. Mike hadn’t seen him. Somebody else said they’d seen him down at Greenie’s with half a load on. At Greenie’s, the bartender said he’d been there, tried to pick a fight and then left, thank Christ. That had been half an hour earlier. I thought about calling my mother to see if she knew where Eileen had been calling from, but even if she had, the trail was certain to be cold by now. Instead, I called Tria to see if she’d changed her mind about letting me take her to dinner. If so, it’d have to be a late one. Her voice sounded a million miles away.

  “Is anything wrong?” I said.

  “With me or you?”

  “With us.”

  “We have something of a situation out here, actually,” she said.

  “That makes two of us,” I said, instinctively not liking the sound of her “situation,” glad for one of my own. I also had the odd feeling that someone was in the room with her, maybe even listening in on the conversation. “How about we exchange stories later?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  I tried a couple more likely spots without any luck, but I found his car right where I’d left it that morning, which meant that either he was in town or he’d recruited Wussy to drive him. I didn’t mind not finding him right away, but I hoped Eileen hadn’t got frustrated waiting for me and called my mother again. After forty-five minutes or so I circled back and stopped into Mike’s again on the off chance, and there he was at the far end of the bar, big as life. Eileen wasn’t around, which meant that calling me was her last official act of intervention.

  Mike came over when he saw me. “He just come in,” he said, guiltily, as if I suspected he’d hid my father in the back room the first time I was there. Sam Hall had all the moves of a small-town alcoholic whose wife knows all of his haunts but, due to the complicity of bartenders, still can’t find him.

  “Son!” my father thundered when he spied me. In front of him he had an empty shot glass and a half-gone beer chaser. He himself was completely gone.

  I slid onto an empty stool next to him. A guy I didn’t know and who looked even drunker than my father leaned forward to see if he could bring me into meaningful focus.

  “Say hello to Roy,” my father said, leaning back on his stool so Roy and I could shake, nearly losing his balance in the process. “Roy’s a no-good drunk,” he explained. “Like me.”

  “Bullshit,” Roy said. “Your old man’s the best.”

  “Right,” I said, and Roy gave my father a hug.

  “You know how come?” Roy wanted to know, and he waited politely for me to ask how come.

  “How come?” I said.

  “He’ll buy a goddamn drink, that’s how come. He ain’t tight. You come in … Sam Hall’s at the bar … you don’t even have to put your hand in your pocket. There’s already a drink in front of you. What’s this, you say. Sam Hall, the bartender says. Am I right, Mike?”

  Roy and my father looked around for Mike, who had been right there, and recently too, though he wasn’t there now.

  “You want to know who’s really the best?” my father said.

  “You tell me,” Roy said. “And I’ll believe you too. You know how come? ’Cause Sam Hall always tells the fuckin’ truth, that’s how fuckin’ come.”

  “Then shut up and let me tell you, you drunk,” my father said.

  “Tell me,” Roy said. “Go ahead. I’ll believe you, too. I am a drunk. I can’t fuckin’ help it.”

  “Shut up before I punch you,” my father said.

  “It’s be a fuckin’ honor to be sucker-punched by Sam Hall.”

  My father looked at me and grinned. “What a drunk. I ever get like him, shoot me.”

  “Shoot me too,” Roy said, and he began to cry.

  “Hey!” my father shouted at him, scaring Roy half off his stool. “Answer me. You want to know who’s really the best?”

  “Who, Sammy?” Roy whimpered. “Who?”

  “My son,” my father answered, then promptly put me in a rancid headlock. “You’re looking at the only thing I ever did right in my whole life. Right here.”

  When my father released me, Mike came over and surveyed the situation. “Roy!” he said. “No crying in the bar.”

  No crying in the bar was one of Mike’s few rules and he was adamant about it. Roy wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve.

  “Buck up!” Mike said.

  “Every man should have a son like mine,” my father said to Roy, as if Mike’s appearance had made exactly no impression on him. “I don’t deserve him.”

  “I had a son once,” Roy said. “But I lost him.”

  “He’s the best,” my father said to Roy, but all the while looking bleary-eyed at me. “It’s just too bad his old man’s a no-good drunk.”

  “I can’t help it,” Roy repeated, crying harder now.

  “Can’t help what,” my father swung around to glare at him.

  “I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me.”

  Mike came back over. “Buck up, Roy,” he warned. “Don’t make me run you.”

  “I had a boy,” Roy wailed. “I did.”

  My father noticed I didn’t have anything in front of me and threw up his hands. “Can we get a drink around here or what?”

  Mike ignored him, fixing Roy intently and ferociously. “No crying in the goddamn bar!” he bellowed.

  “I gotta wee,” Roy said, as if this sudden necessity were what he’d been crying about.

  “So go,” my father said.

  Roy headed for the men’s room. “What an asshole,” Mike said. “You watch. He’ll be in there for about five minutes. Then he’ll try to sneak out on his tab.”

  “Take it out of here,” my father said, pushing the money he had on the bar toward Mike.

  “What for? He pulls the same shit every week.”

  “He probably hasn’t got it,” my father said.

  “I can’t stand that crying shit,” Mike said.

  “Shut up and get my kid a drink,” my father said. Then to me, “You had dinner?”

  I said I hadn’t.

  “Me neither,” he said. “Or lunch, or breakfast.”

  “We had breakfast together, if you remember.”

  He stared at me. “That was yesterday.”

  “That was today. Yesterday was yesterday.”

  The door to the men’s room opened a crack.

  “Watch this,” Mike said, pretending to go about his business.

  After a minute the door opened wider, a liquid eye in the crack. Then Roy appeared. He was a little guy anyway, and pretty nimble for a drunk. All the way to the front door he scooted along, facing the wall, perhaps on the ostrich principle that if you didn’t see anybody, then nobody could see you. When he got to the door, Mike yelled, “So long, Roy!”

  “What’s the damage?” my father said.

  “Couple a bucks,” Mike said.

  “So why the big deal?”

  “Fine,” Mike said, taking them from my father’s pile. “Spend your money.”

  “Let’s eat something,” I said, fearing my father had forgotten and wouldn’t remember again.

  “Why not,” he said.

  He was wobbly, but we made it to a booth.

  “Eileen off tonight?” I said, for something to say, and because I wondered what had become of her after calling me.

  My father shook his head. “I don’t even feel sorry for her anymore. I try to tell her a little bit. Prepare her.… What for? You can’t talk to people who won’t listen.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “She’s a good girl. The best. It’s not that. She’s pretty smart, too. Except about Numb Nuts. Then she’s dumb as …” He looked around the table for something that Eileen could be dumb as.

  “You should stay out of it,” I said.

  “I should,” he surpr
ised me by saying. “I know I should. I just can’t stand the sight of him. He’s no good. Hell, I’m no good, but he’s completely worthless, that son of a bitch.”

  “Ignore him.”

  “He’s home all of twelve hours. What’s the first thing he does?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess.”

  “Forget him. Fuck him.”

  My father shrugs as if to suggest that fuck him is the right idea, but he can’t just now because he’s too busy remembering him. “He’s home all of twelve hours and two hundred dollars disappears from his mother’s dresser drawer. Do you believe that shit? Nobody there but him and his mother. We’re not supposed to suspect him, right? It’s been sitting right there in the drawer for a month, but the minute he comes home it’s suddenly gone. And nobody’s supposed to suspect him, the rotten son of a bitch. It’s not bad enough he’s got to rip her off. On top of it, we’re not supposed to suspect him. How come you suspect me, he asks her. How come you don’t ask Sammy where it went?” My father shook his head. “That’s not even the bad part. The bad part is all he’s got to do is ask her and she’ll give it to him. He’d rather steal it. Take it from her. Just take it. Never mind how hard she worked for it. Fuck you, Ma. I’m taking it. You know what he had the balls to say to me today?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “He says, Sammy, all I want is what’s mine. What’s yours, I ask him. I want to know what the hell he figures is his. Just what the hell do you figure you got a right to, I say. What’s mine is mine, he says. He keeps saying it over and over. What’s mine is mine. What’s mine is mine.”

  Mike came over with two plates of spaghetti and put them in front of us. My father pushed his away. “Jesus,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “I don’t think I can eat.”

  “Eat a little,” Mike said. “You’ll feel better.”

  “I can’t drink the hard stuff,” my father said. “I know I can’t, but I do anyhow.”

  “You all right?” I said. He’d suddenly gone absolutely gray.

  “All I can see is that big dumb face. What’s mine is mine.”

  My father drew his plate toward him, twirled strands of spaghetti absentmindedly. “It’s not just him. Everything’s fucked up all of a sudden.”

  “Not everything,” I said. “You aren’t being sued, for instance.”

  “I never was,” he said. “Just my insurance company. Fuck them.”

  “You have,” I said. “Over the years.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad. They only want to insure people like you who don’t have accidents. It’s up to people like me to make sure the bastards don’t keep every last dollar for themselves.”

  “Thanks,” I told him. “I guess the rest of us owe you one.”

  He surrendered half a smile. “Yeah,” he said. “You and Skinny. Great favor I did him, huh? Or didn’t you hear.”

  I said I hadn’t heard anything.

  “I bought him breakfast. He left just before you came in yesterday morning.”

  “This morning?”

  “Whenever. Told me they were going like hell on the road. Pouring half a mile a day, pretty near. Saturdays overtime. I say great, Skinny, that means money, right? He’s got the shakes, but off he goes. He gets up there, gets out of the car, grabs his flag, steps out from behind the trunk and gets run over by the first cement mixer of the day.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Is he in the hospital?”

  “They don’t put dead people in the hospital. They need the beds.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Skinny?”

  “They ran right over him,” he said. “Him and his red flag. First fuckin’ thing they did today. Then they poured concrete until five, or so they tell me.”

  It refused to sink in. Not Skinny Donovan, I kept thinking. In my mind’s eye I kept picturing the dusty road, the stalled truck, the silent men gathered into a semicircle, Skinny’s legs and feet visible, the way I’d see them when I rounded the corner out back of Our Lady of Sorrows where he liked to sleep, his back up against the cool stucco. Who’d have guessed Skinny would die working, I asked my father.

  Wussy came in then and slid into the booth next to me. “Word of advice, Sam’s Kid,” he said. “Don’t let Sam Hall pay for dinner. He’s bad luck.”

  “That’s what I was just telling him,” my father said. “He should go back to Arizona. As far as he can get from his old man.”

  “You’re a menace all right,” Wussy agreed. “You don’t scare me though. In fact, I’ll eat your own goddamn spaghetti, since you aren’t going to do nothing but stare at it.”

  “Good.” My father pushed the plate toward him. “Eat it. I keep seeing Skinny and Numb Nuts.”

  “You look better than you did an hour ago,” Wussy observed.

  “I feel worse.”

  “Good.”

  My father winked at me halfheartedly. “Eats my spaghetti and insults me.”

  “Sorry to walk out on you,” Wussy said. “But I can’t be around Roy Heinz.”

  “He always speaks well of you,” my father said.

  Wussy nodded. “He go to the bathroom on you again?”

  “Sort of,” my father said. “Not on me exactly.”

  Suddenly something clicked. “Heinz,” I said.

  “You knew his kid,” Wussy said. “You was in the golf ball business together. Willie Heinz his name was.”

  My father came back from the men’s room looking a little better.

  Wussy finished my father’s spaghetti and pushed the plate away. “I got this,” he said when my father took out some money.

  “It’s only fair,” my father agreed.

  “I’d let the kid pay for it except I figure he’s almost as bad luck as you.”

  “Not really,” my father said, looking me over, rather fondly it seemed to me, though more sensibly than his earlier drunken ecstasy.

  “How could he come from you and not be trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” my father admitted.

  “I think I’ll go home anyhow,” Wussy said. “When you start whistling into the bottom of whiskey bottles—”

  “No more,” my father promised. “Beer only.”

  “Not me,” Wussy said. “You drink with him, Sam’s Kid.”

  My father bought a round before he could leave though, and then I bought one, and we all settled in. Wussy said there must be a full moon out—Sam’s Kid actually bought a round.

  “It’s his last, too,” said my father, who always embarrassed me by refusing to let me be part of the rotation. Sometimes, I could sneak a round in, if he hadn’t told the bartender not to take my money, but mostly I drank for free, paying only in good-natured insults received. The men my father drank with had all been told I was a college kid saving for tuition, which exempted me from everything but humiliation. Busting my balls about being a cheapskate was considered good sport. “We gotta get him back to school before he turns into one of us for good,” my father warned, “and his mother blames me.”

  “Every time I think of her,” Wussy said, “I pray that after she shoots you she’ll be satisfied. Speaking of shooting, the table’s open.”

  Nights like these, it was a very real possibility that I would become one of them, permanently, irrevocably. Here I was, twenty-four years old, and less than twenty hours earlier I had become the lover of the very girl who had haunted my imagination off and on for at least a dozen years. And somehow, without even thinking about it, I had reneged on my promise to call her back, take her out to dinner, preferring instead to be sucked into the maelstrom of another drunken evening with two middle-aged, beat-up tomcats. My father and Wussy were Mohawk men, which meant that somewhere along the line each had turned his back on a woman. Many had turned their back on more than one. Most now realized that in doing so they’d fucked up. Some would even admit it when they were drunk enough. A few, like Skinny Donovan, would try to return thirty years after the fact, to women who didn�
��t even exist anymore, who had gone evil or horny or crazy with waiting and raising kids, or had just dried up from working two hard jobs. Other guys, like Tree, succumbed to confusion, never sure whether he’d got his most recent case of the clap from his wife or his mistress. Since each had been the other, and might be again, it probably didn’t matter. Somehow he’d got them both to love him, but on Saturday nights he preferred to drink beer and shoot pool and play cards with men who had similar stories to tell.

  What we shared—yes, I would be one of them tonight—was something not to be underestimated. We could all boast, this night, anyway, that no matter how messed up we were, at least our lives were not being dictated by women. Offered tender breasts and warm pussies, by God we showed them we could not be so easily bought. Never mind that in some cases the offer was twenty years old and nineteen rescinded, we were still making a point regarding the female population. A declaration of independence. We could do without them, because they were only women, after all.

  And we were men. We had business. And with a blue baseball game tilting down from the corner above the bar, we tended to the business of being men, brown sweating bottles of beer lined up in phalanxes, bought not as needed, but in rounds, the real drinkers setting a pace, like the lead runners in a road race, finding a stride, feeling instinctively the race’s length, its rhythms. Our collective composition always changing, as somebody heard somebody was somewhere and went there to find him, get that ten-spot he was owed, somebody else slipping into the vacated space at the bar, ensuring welcome by buying a round or promising to get the next one. Sometimes loud—all of us shouting at once, pointing at the replay on the blue screen—sometimes hushed, conspiratorial, can I take twenty till Monday, I wouldn’t ask, but …

  It was all rhythm and stride and knowing when to move, what it would take to get you from where you were to another spot just like it a hundred yards down the street where they had two pool tables instead of the one. You had to know how many quarters were lined up under the bumpers and whose they were, who was in the middle of something, who was waiting for somebody to show up. You began to sense when the forces that could cause you to pick your money up off the bar would become greater than those that kept you rooted to a particular stool. When you understood the rhythms, the subtleties made sense. You could predict that when somebody in your party got up to take a leak, it would set in motion a string of small causes and effects that would have you out the door and in the street in, say, five minutes, which meant that if you had a full bottle of beer in front of you, you either got to work or you left it.