The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “A little shot,” I assured him. When I’d called to say I was coming I’d told him about the junior editorship I’d just been promoted to. “Just slightly bigger than a year ago when I was no shot at all.”

  “Well, that’s all right,” he said. “My son, the book editor. What do you think of my cheaters? I bought them so I could see the racing form.”

  “Most people like the kind that hook behind both ears.”

  “I like them that way myself,” he admitted. “In fact, these were that way until I sat on ’em. I could probably fix them if I could see, but to fix them I have to take them off, and then I can’t see anymore. They’re just for night driving anyhow. Even the risk pool wouldn’t insure me if I didn’t get them.”

  “Don’t they usually give you a spare set?”

  “Yup. I lost those two days after I sat on these. If I could just lose this pair, I’d go back and order some more. But every time I walk off some asshole yells at me to take my glasses with me. You son of a bitch, I tell him. You couldn’t yell at me when I walked off and left my good pair. Every time I try to lose these bastards you notice.”

  By this time we were outside the terminal on the ramp across from the short-term parking, which was only a quarter full. I started looking for a car that might be my father’s.

  “Where you going?” my father wanted to know. He’d stopped by a pale yellow Subaru compact parked squarely in the middle of a loading zone. He slipped a key into its trunk and turned. There was a reassuring thunk, but when he lifted up, the trunk stayed shut. “Bitch,” he said. “It does this sometimes in wet weather.”

  I looked around. “It rained here today?”

  He went around to the driver’s side and slung my bag in the backseat, already piled high with miscellaneous junk. He shook his head no. “Why, did it rain in the city?”

  I grinned at him across the Subaru’s hood. “It’s good to be home.”

  “Get in then,” he said. “We aren’t home yet, in case you didn’t notice.”

  He was right, too.

  Between the airport and the Thruway entrance he told me all about the Subaru, which somebody’d talked him into buying. That little shit? he wanted to know, but then he figured what the hell. We’d taught the Japs a thing or two. Maybe they’d learned how to make cars. People said they did, and the guy who’d owned it didn’t want an arm and a leg, so …

  What troubled me, but apparently not my father, was the way people kept honking and swerving around us. My father honked back, waved, and continued talking. People honked hellos at him all the time in Mohawk, where they knew him, and he saw no reason why they shouldn’t in Albany, where they didn’t.

  “Do you have your lights on?” I said finally, noticing that the dash wasn’t lit up.

  He looked down over the rims of his glasses and had to let go of the wheel to catch them when they fell off. “Should be,” he said.

  The Thruway entrance was a hundred yards away. We pulled in. When the attendant at the gatehouse handed us our ticket, he said, “Your lights, Mac.”

  “Right,” my father said, and he put the Subaru in gear. “Not this shit again,” he said, flicking the light switch in and out. I tried the radio, windshield wipers, cigarette lighter. Nothing. My father tried the turn signals. Nothing. We merged onto the Thruway, regardless, a big sedan careening around us at the last second. I put on my seatbelt.

  “I’ll show you a little trick,” my father said when a double-hitch Peterbilt roared by and tugged at us. Slipping into its wake, my father goosed the Subaru, which strained dutifully until be got right on the Peterbilt’s big, well-lit ass end.

  My father, pleased with himself, looked over at me from above the black rims of his cockeyed glasses. “You worry too much,” he said. “You always did.”

  I checked the speedometer, which was vibrating between sixty-five and seventy. Mohawk was forty black miles away. I wondered if, when we hit the Peterbilt, I’d be able to get down quickly enough to avoid decapitation.

  “I’ve always wanted a Subaru,” I said, trying to sound more full of admiration than terror. “But there’s not much point in owning a car in the city.”

  “I can’t live without one,” my father said, punching in the cigarette lighter, having already forgotten. After a few seconds he began to lean slightly toward the lighter in anticipation of its clicking out. His Camel dangled from his lips as he divided his attention between the big truck only a few feet in front of us and the recalcitrant lighter. Finally it dawned on him. “Argh!” he said, pulling the cold lighter out, examining it, putting it to his stubbled cheek to make sure. Then he tossed it out the window and turned to me. “So,” he said. “Tell me about this editor shit.”

  “Editorship,” I corrected, and pointed at the Peterbilt. “Are those brake lights?”

  I had only one other contact with Mohawk in the decade after I came to New York. It came in the form of a newspaper clipping, a month old by the time I received it. ELDERLY WOMAN VICTIM OF CARNIVAL RIDE, the headline said in bold black letters, though the account beneath was slender. Miss Rachael Agajanian, a resident of the Mohawk Valley Nursing Home, had been one of a party taken on an outing to the Mohawk Fair. According to witnesses, her wheelchair had rolled backward off the merry-go-round when the attendant had gone to the aid of another resident of the home who, seated on one of the stationary benches, had unaccountably begun to scream. Miss Agajanian’s wheelchair had become entangled in the machinery and been dragged, with its occupant, several complete revolutions, before the ride, which had been left on automatic, could be stopped.

  The clipping from the Mohawk Republican was inside a small envelope; there was no note. When my father called a month later I asked him about the incident and, predictably, he had a lot more information than the newspaper account, and some of it may even have been true. The mangled old woman had been rushed to the New Mohawk Medical Services Center, where the emergency room staff immediately began to attend to her. She had been quite a sight but the doctors and nurses did their best with her. Unfortunately, at some point, someone explained how the accident happened, that the old woman had been thrown from the merry-go-round, whereupon the entire team dissolved. Each time their hilarity was about to subside, someone else entered the room, looked at the patient and wanted to know what on earth had happened, setting everyone off again. This continued until the patient died.

  “Hell of a way to go,” my father said. “I bet she pissed in her pants that day.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Do you ever see Claude Schwartz around?”

  “That’s funny,” he said. “I heard something about him just the other day. The kid that hung himself, right? Worked at the post office?”

  I said that was Claude Schwartz.

  “He just took off one day about a month ago. Left his wife, kids, mother, all of them. Gave notice at the post office, cashed his last check and was gone. What kind of man does a thing like that?”

  Foolishly, I took this to be a rhetorical question.

  “Well?” my father said, his long distance voice full of genuine perplexity.

  42

  From the living room I heard the shower thunk off, the glass door open and close. Leigh usually took long showers, which made me wonder if she’d heard the phone in there. “The timing isn’t so great, that’s all,” I told my father.

  “So don’t, then,” he said. “Come in a couple weeks when you’re straightened out. What’s the difference. I’ll be right here.”

  The bathroom door—the one off our bedroom—opened and I caught a glimpse of her in the bedroom mirror, toweling her hair dry. Until Leigh, no woman had ever performed this womanly task in my presence. Had one done so, and looked the way Leigh did, her olive skin glistening, I think I’d have proposed marriage on the spot.

  “Will you need help moving?” I said.

  The sound of my voice caused her to pivot quickly and scoot behind the door until she could determine whether I was on the phone
or we had company.

  “Moving what?” my father wanted to know.

  “Furniture.”

  “Haven’t got any,” he said. “I can carry my own suitcase, if I could find it.”

  “The new place is furnished?”

  “Will be,” he said. “That’s all taken care of. The furniture store delivers, so all I gotta do is be there and point. I may get somebody else to do that. Putting things where they should go was one of the things I could never do to suit your mother.”

  “Aren’t you glad you don’t have to suit her anymore?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said, but there was a wistful quality to his answer that suggested he might like to try pleasing, if not my mother, then some woman, just one more time, to see if it could be done.

  Leigh came out in her cotton robe and mouthed a “who?” at me.

  I cupped my hand over the phone. “Your father-in-law-to-be.” Then to him, “How’s next weekend?”

  “That’s the only one that won’t work,” he said. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t, which was surprising. Usually such an opening produced a long, convoluted story, at the end of which you still wouldn’t know why next weekend was out. “Your honey there?”

  I told him she was and waved Leigh in from the kitchen like a third base coach. “The week after, then,” I said before handing the phone over to Leigh.

  “Whenever. There’s a little something I want to tell you about, but it’ll keep.”

  I handed the phone to Leigh, but stayed there, thinking about his last elliptical remark and wondering what it could mean. Coyness wasn’t among my father’s usual vices.

  “Are you as sexy as your voice?” I heard him ask Leigh, who motioned for me to go away. Since she’d moved in with me ten months before, they always talked when he called. Frequently her conversations with my father were longer than my own. It had taken her a while to get the hang of him, but she thought she had his number now.

  “Sexier,” she said.

  I went into the kitchen and made myself an iced tea.

  “Right now?” I heard her say. “Nothing but a robe. I just got out of the shower … well … don’t ask if you don’t want to know. It’s not my fault if you have a weak ticker.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. It was their usual contest to see who’d get embarrassed first.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me ask.”

  “What?” I said.

  “He wants to know if you’ll take some dirty pictures if he springs for the film?” Then, whispering urgently, “How do I get out of this?”

  “My mother had to move to California.”

  She was listening again, though, and her expression had become serious before she turned her back to me. “No,” she said, then, “I will.”

  I took a sip of tea, added another half teaspoon of sugar, watched Leigh wind strands of wet hair around her index finger. After a minute she turned around again and waved me back in. “He wants to talk to you again.”

  “Do you play golf?” he wanted to know.

  “What?”

  “Golf, dummy, golf.”

  “Yes,” I said, then added. “Not really.”

  “You got clubs?”

  I said I did, as if to prove that he could not so easily diagnose what was wrong with my game.

  “Bring them when you come,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve taken up golf?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just some of these guys I’m hanging around with. Couple of them are your age. We ride around in carts, have a hell of a good time.”

  I tried to envision this. “Really?”

  “Just if you want to,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “Incredible,” I said after we’d hung up.

  Leigh came over and sat on my lap. “Share?”

  “Yes. Everything I have.” I gave her the iced tea, which she drained.

  “Why don’t you want to go see your father this weekend?” she said, handing me back the empty glass. “You’ve been busy saying no to parties all week. You’ve never had a freer weekend.”

  Her robe had gapped open at the throat, and I slipped my hand in. “I have every minute planned. By the end of the weekend you will have come to your senses. In short, reconsider the folly of your present position.”

  “Which position is that? The one where I’m sitting on the lumpy lap of a certifiable sicko, or my reluctance to marry said sicko?”

  “The second,” I said, working clumsily at the sash of her robe. “Who taught you how to tie a seaman’s knot?”

  “The other sicko. The one I was married to. He was an expert knot tier.”

  “He tied you up? You never told me things got kinky.”

  “Metaphorically kinky. Because he thought of me as bound, he concluded I couldn’t get away.”

  “You sure showed him,” finally succeeding with the knot and slipping the robe off her shoulders.

  “If you’re planning on taking any pictures for your father,” she said, looking down at her abdomen, which was showing the first signs of swelling, “you better do it soon.”

  Between New York’s Port Authority and the bus station in Poughkeepsie, I sat next to a pugnacious woman from Brooklyn who was visiting her grandchildren. When I made the mistake of telling her that I worked for a publishing house, she immediately tried to pick a fight. “I never read the new books,” she said.

  “It’s a free country,” I said, smiling as sweetly as I knew how and wishing I’d taken the plane. The only reason I hadn’t was that my father would have had to pick me up in Albany. I didn’t know if he still had the killer Subaru, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Too free,” said my companion. “There ought to be a law against these young ones writing about us. They think we were like they are now, jumping from one bed to another. World War Two. Imagine. Jumping from one bed to another.” She waved her hand in disgust. “I just read the same books over and over. From Here to Eternity.”

  I said I knew what she meant.

  “Twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty years old. And they think they know how we felt. Why do they pretend they understand us?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  “Of course you don’t. How could you? How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four,” I admitted.

  “There,” she said. “How could you write about the Second World War?”

  “My father was part of the Normandy invasion, actually,” I said, unsure whether this intelligence would mollify or further inflame her. Her proscription against my writing about what she considered her war was entirely unnecessary, but I wasn’t sure she’d believe me if I told her. She’d suspect that I was secretly doing it anyway.

  “You listen to him then,” she said. “Maybe you’ll learn.”

  “I’m sure of it,” I told her. “He never talks about it though.”

  “Why should he?” the good woman wanted to know. “The ones who saw, the ones who did, they aren’t talkers. It’s the others who are the talkers.”

  Her implication was clear. I was a talker. She could tell. If I wrote a book, she wouldn’t read it.

  “Do you know what I do?” she said. “I look at copyright dates. If it’s written after 1955….” she waved goodbye to it.

  When we pulled into the station in Poughkeepsie, she took my hand and squeezed, suddenly full of goodwill. “It’s like Frank Sinatra says. To look at us, you couldn’t always tell what was in our heads, but you always knew where our hearts were.”

  The woman’s eyes had gone misty and I could tell that her heart was somewhere, all right, and it wasn’t Poughkeepsie either. After her departure I had the two seats to myself, but I kept thinking about the woman. In some ways she reminded me of my mother and the other women I’d known whose lives were compromised by the war and who now felt an odd affection for its memory and guarded their loss against new assailants. My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war�
�s casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn’t the one who left, the one she’d fallen in love with. I didn’t doubt that she believed this simple truth or even that it was true, after a fashion. But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don’t know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely. That was almost certainly true in my mother’s case. The Sam Hall she’d fallen in love with was only narrowly based on a real person. The war, their separation, had encouraged a kind of poetic license where he was concerned. If he hadn’t come home, he’d have remained the love of her life. It seemed probable to me that my companion on the bus had lost someone, and that the loss had changed everything, created a truth that could not be modified, only accepted, reread.

  I didn’t envy the woman her text etched in stone. No good editor would. And yet there was something to be said for permanence. At thirty-four, there was precious little in my own life. I’d succeeded in falling in love with and getting pregnant the girl with whom I had been living for nearly a year, who had permitted, even encouraged, every decent intimacy engaged in by consenting adults, who looked forward to bearing, delivering, and raising our child, but who steadfastly drew the line at the prospect of a lifetime of my company. I tried to think of a good way to explain all this to my father, but the trip between Poughkeepsie and Mohawk wasn’t nearly long enough, and when we pulled up in front of the cigar store on the Four Corners, I’d made exactly no progress.

  I had decided against phoning him back to say that I was coming for the weekend after all. I thought now about calling from the cigar store and having him come fetch me, since his new apartment was twenty or so blocks away, but the evening was cool and my bag was light, containing little more than two days’ change of clothing. So I walked up Main past the Mohawk Grill, which had closed for the night, along with everything else but the gin mills. The biggest change on Main was that Klein’s Department Store was closed and boarded up, three stories’ worth of windows all black and lifeless. There was no more Accounting Department and no way for me to settle my long-standing account, to make an honest man of myself. Further up the street, whoever inherited Mike’s Place apparently hadn’t felt sufficiently motivated to change the name of the establishment. New signs weren’t cheap, and when the old one had a decent reputation to trade on, you were better off leaving it where it was. It was one of the constants of Mohawk life that businesses were bought, sold, bartered, and won in poker games every day without significantly altering the establishments themselves. There wasn’t even any perceived need to print up an “Under New Management” sign to stick in the front window, because everybody already knew before you could put it there. The fact that you couldn’t get a decent plate of spaghetti at Mike’s anymore was common knowledge before the new owner had opened for business that first Monday morning. That he would attempt to appease the old crowd with Buffalo chicken wings was already the subject of conversation and conjecture at the Mohawk Grill.