The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “There isn’t much,” I told him, taking the check out of my wallet. “I was going to leave it there.”

  “You must not believe in ghosts,” Wussy said.

  “I don’t really want the money,” I said. “I doubt I’m even entitled to it.”

  “It’s up to you, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said. “Give it to Eileen. Sam Hall was a prince compared to the little moron she ended up marrying. If women didn’t always want to save people, they’d be perfect.”

  I handed him the check, which my father had predated and signed, but otherwise left blank. “I’ll leave it to your discretion,” I said. I almost suggested he keep it himself, since he’d no doubt earned it and a good deal besides during the last few weeks and down through the years, but I didn’t want to risk insulting his friendship. We looked around at my father’s apartment, Wussy still on the threshold.

  It took me all of two seconds to locate the other copy of the anatomical gift. In a last-minute uncharacteristic fit of organization, he’d left everything important in his upper righthand dresser drawer. Wussy, or somebody, had piled his three weeks’ worth of accumulated mail right there under the mirror, so I went through it to make sure there wasn’t anything I’d need later. Most of it was junk. I opened an insurance company envelope marked IMPORTANT, which contained a letter stating that because my father had had no accidents or speeding tickets for the past five years, he was now eligible for insurance outside the risk pool, at considerably reduced rates.

  By the time I was finished, Wussy had returned from the bank.

  “You sure you don’t want this,” he said.

  “Very sure.”

  We shook hands there on the schoolhouse steps.

  “He was my friend, Ned,” Wussy said. And then he invited me to come up sometime so we could go fishing. “I don’t know about anymore,” he said. “But you used to be a good patient fisherman.”

  Before going over to The Elms, I drove to Fonda and onto the small bridge that spanned the Mohawk River. There was one other thing I had discovered in the righthand drawer of my father’s dresser—a .38 caliber revolver purchased, no doubt, as a hedge against the final ravages of the disease. It was this, I now realized, that he had wanted me to take him home to that afternoon almost three weeks before. I’ve never been able to resolve in my own mind whether or not he would have done it, and I couldn’t that February afternoon as I stood on the bridge above the Mohawk River. If he had been able to do it, he’d have spared himself two senseless operations during those final weeks, and God only knew how many indignities, the last of which was an heroic attempt to resuscitate him, in direct violation of the written instructions he’d placed on his bedstand and which, now, were neatly folded somewhere in the same unmarked envelope that contained the anatomical gift he’d made of his remains.

  But I cannot fault the doctors. In my own way, I too was unable to execute his wishes. He’d begged me before I left that afternoon when he’d tried to go home to stay away from the hospital, now that it was just a matter of time. But I couldn’t, and toward the end I saw in his eyes each time that I appeared beside his bed that he was glad to see me, and scared as hell of dying alone. Which he ended up doing anyway.

  The quirky February warm spell had thawed patches near the center of the icebound river where black water could be seen rolling swiftly, even in the late afternoon dusk. Spring, it occurred to me, was the season my grandfather had left out of his scheme of things, his personal credo.

  The river received the handgun without a splash and hurried it deep out of sight, like a terrible thought. I didn’t worry about its surfacing somewhere and causing harm. The Mohawk never surrendered her dead.

  I didn’t hurry back from Fonda, though my errand there had made me late. It was nearly six, and I’d told Mike I’d be at The Elms around five to help welcome my father’s friends. Still, I was not prepared for what I saw when I rounded the curve and the restaurant came into view. The parking lot was full, and cars lined both sides of the two-lane blacktop for a quarter of a mile. My first errant conclusion was that Mike’s plan to close the restaurant had run amuck. He’d forgotten some local festivity, the aftermath of which was now being felt at the restaurant. There had been a rush, too many expectant diners to turn away. I tried to think what festivity it might be in the middle of February in Mohawk as I weaved my way through the sea of cars and parked Sam Hall fashion, one wheel up a stump. My headlights caught Tree with his baggy pants down around his ankles, peeing on the side of a car that I doubted, from its overall excellent condition, could be his. The expression on his face was one of pure relief. “The l-l-line’s a f-f-fucking mile long in there,” he said when I got out.

  That explained why he was peeing in the parking lot, but much was still shrouded in mystery, like why he’d chosen to pee on the door of the car and not its tire, and even more interestingly, why he’d found it necessary to drop his trousers altogether instead of simply unzipping.

  “Don’t those have a fly?” I said when he bent down to pull them up.

  “Of course,” he said, as if I’d insulted him. He might not be rich, but at least he could afford pants with zippers. When he’d fastened them at the waist, he pulled a portion of colorful shirttail through the opening to show me, in case I doubted his word. I nodded.

  Even the restaurant’s entryway was crowded, though I didn’t recognize anyone there. Tree took the lead and parted the throng by announcing, “I f-found him. M-make way for S-sammy’s boy.”

  Inside, the first person we ran into was Wussy, who was wearing a sport coat for only the second time in our long association. “Sam’s Kid,” he said. “I thought you’d got lost.”

  I grinned at him. I was Sam’s Kid again. Demoted after an incredibly brief tenure as my own person. “Have you ever done anything you said you were going to?” I asked him.

  “Yup,” he said. “I warned your old man I was going to outlive him, for instance. Of course I’m taking your word for the fact that he’s dead. I never saw no evidence.”

  “Neither did I, now that you mention it,” I told him.

  “Be just like him to turn up,” Wussy said.

  “Everybody else did,” I said, looking around. Both the lounge and the big dining room were packed and noisy, like the evening so many years ago when I’d thought my mother was dead, was so positive, in fact, that it had taken my father and Eileen and F. William Peterson to convince me I was wrong. That recollection, together with Wussy’s remark that it would be just like Sam Hall to turn up, engendered an almost overpowering sense that if I turned around quickly I’d see him grinning at me from across the room. And not the Sam Hall from the hospital, reduced almost to nothing by the cancer, but rather the old Sam Hall, in perfect health, who’d sparred with Jack Ward and Mike, and who’d offered on half a dozen occasions to put F. William Peterson on the seat of his pants and occasionally proved that this was no idle threat. Wussy was right; it wasn’t like my father to miss this kind of an opportunity for sport, and it took me a moment to shake off my father’s almost material presence.

  Across the room Mike was passing beer glasses beneath two open taps, then placing them on the bar. I didn’t see any money changing hands, nor was the cash register ringing. “Mike’s doing an open bar?” I said.

  Wussy nodded. “So far. He better stop pretty soon. Roy Heinz just came in, and he can drink a keg all by himself.”

  “I don’t see Eileen.”

  “She’ll be here,” Wussy said. “You wait.”

  I was watching Roy Heinz, who appeared to be searching for something. I couldn’t imagine what, given that he’d just arrived. After he’d gone into the dining room, peeked into the kitchen, and checked behind the bar, he came over to where Wussy and I were standing. “Where the hell’s Sammy?”

  “He died, Roy,” Wussy said. “Didn’t you hear?”

  “But where is he?” Roy insisted, looking first at Wussy, then at me.

  “No one knows,” Wussy said.


  Roy Heinz accepted this. “Open bar?” he said.

  We told him it was.

  “Nice gesture,” he said, shaking my hand, apparently having arrived at the erroneous conclusion that I was footing the bill. “Sammy would’ve liked that. Sammy would always buy a drink.”

  “You gonna live around here now?” he added hopefully, as if he suspected I might have inherited from my father some liberal, beer-buying gene.

  I went over to say hello to Mike as soon as there was an opportunity. “You invite all these people?” I said.

  “Twenty or so. The others invited theirselves.”

  “You’ve got the whole county here,” I said. For the most part, these were not people who normally frequented The Elms. They’d all come to have a look at the place, as they had for Jack Ward’s wake at the white jewel house. “I hope you’ll let me help out.”

  Mike waved my offer away good-naturedly. “Sammy and I go way back. This town might as well give up, now.” He looked and sounded genuinely pessimistic on the community’s behalf.

  “We can give him a send-off, anyway,” he added.

  As people began to come over and introduce themselves to me, I kept thinking about Mike’s remark—that Mohawk might as well give up, now that Sam Hall was gone. Given my father’s comprehensive lack of garden variety civic obligation, it was a pretty funny observation. But I knew what he meant just the same, and as I looked around the packed restaurant and greeted strangers who wanted to say they’d miss Sam Hall, I was suddenly scared. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it without him. Here I was, thirty-five years old, having lived more or less independently since leaving Mohawk for the university, a child of my own knocking for admittance at birth’s door. I had become, since the two years I’d lived with my father, if not a model of success, at least a model of self-reliance. And yet, right then, as I stood among my father’s friends and acquaintances drinking Mike’s free beer in Sam Hall’s honor, waves of panic as physically tangible as abdominal nausea crashed over me. It wasn’t that I needed Sam Hall for anything specific. I’d have been satisfied to know that his consciousness had somehow been saved, that his essence was being kept alive in some jar on a shelf somewhere, that he continued to be. Of such fears, I thought as I drank off the rest of my beer in a gulp, are religions born.

  Also alcoholics. Before long, I began to feel the effects of both the beer and the forced joviality of the crowd. Everybody had a Sam Hall story to tell me. I was even introduced to the fabled Angelo, the cop whose favorite pastime had been lying in wait for my father outside bars so he could ticket him for drunk driving before he had a chance to get out of first gear. “Your old man was aces,” he told me from beneath heavy, hooded eyes. Then he repeated the story my father had told me the night I returned to Mohawk, about how he’d fled down a dark side street, pulled the convertible over to the curb, slid into the passenger seat, and then tried to convince Angelo that Untemeyer had been driving. I gathered that I was supposed to laugh, though Angelo didn’t, and something about his manner suggested that he’d be watching me now that Sam Hall was gone.

  My father’s favorite cop, little Andy Winkler, who’d been a paragon of sympathy and understanding the morning he’d discovered us breaking into the Night Owl to retrieve my duffel bag, was there also, though he informed me sadly that he wasn’t a policeman anymore. A year or two earlier he’d pulled a trucker over and tried to write him a ticket for doing eighty in a forty-five-mile zone. When the trucker couldn’t talk Andy out of it, he’d beaten the tiny policeman senseless and drove off leaving Andy in a ditch. It was not this that discouraged him, however, nor was it the months he spent in the hospital recuperating. What finally sent him in search of another line of work was fate. His first week back in uniform, a trucker who bore an unfortunate resemblance to the one who had pummeled him was blowing down the highway on the outskirts of town past Andy Winkler’s police car, which was parked, as always, behind a billboard. Andy gave chase and pulled the semi over. When the trucker got out and saw Andy Winkler, he made the mistake of grinning, probably at Andy’s size, though Andy concluded, and not without justification, that the trucker was smiling at the prospect of beating him up. Then he remembered the advice my father had given him so long ago, and he took his revolver out and shot the trucker in the thigh to prevent history repeating itself. But as luck would have it, several passersby saw the unprovoked attack and so Andy was now finishing up his associate’s degree in refrigerator repair at the community college in Glens Falls. He hadn’t been beaten up once since matriculating and he’d discovered an aptitude for ferreting out what was wrong with refrigerators. Plus, he fit in behind them better than anybody in his class. “You miss the excitement though,” he confided to me. “Once you’ve been a cop …” he let the thought trail off.

  I discovered that talking to Andy Winkler had cheered me up considerably. His good-natured optimism dispelled some of the panic I’d been feeling, and when I spied Eileen Littler across the room, I was glad, though I had been dreading seeing her all day. I had not come to Mohawk for her son’s funeral, nor had I spoken to her since his death.

  I don’t know what I expected, but her appearance gave me a jolt. Always angular, she now looked caved in, somehow, as if she’d finally stopped fighting and agreed to pay some long-deferred judgment. She’d always possessed an admirable vitality, and I found myself wondering whether she’d lost it waiting around for my father, or by finally giving up on him. Or it may have died when her son did. I would never understand Eileen Littler well enough to know for sure, but seeing her now reminded me of her ancestor, the mythical Myrtle Littler, who lent her name to the park, and who died of heartbreak. When Eileen spotted me and came over, though, her hug still had plenty of resolve. Among other things she seemed resolved not to cry in front of her husband, who waited an obedient step behind her and who was not much bigger than Andy Winkler. He looked to be in his mid-fifties and sported a pretty amazing cowlick for a man of his years. For some reason the cowlick grew faster than the rest of his close-cropped hair. Either that or he asked his barber not to trim it. Wussy had intimated that the man was not considered gifted, even by local standards, and a first glance tended to confirm that impression.

  “Have you seen the pictures outside?” Eileen said when we broke off our embrace.

  “Pictures?”

  “In the entry. Look when you get a chance.”

  She hadn’t introduced her husband, and the little man was making exactly no headway angling himself into our immediate vicinity. Apparently Eileen was of the opinion that he wouldn’t earn acknowledgment until he’d shown sufficient skill at angling to appear in her peripheral vision.

  When I asked her how she was doing, making the question sound as casual as possible, she said so-so, and forced a smile, adding, “All things considered. It’s good that I did what I did when I did it, if you know what I mean.”

  I glanced at the little man again, who had heard his wife’s elliptical remark and stopped angling a moment to consider whether it might apply to him.

  “I do,” I told her.

  Then she surprised me by saying, “I was in Albany one day last week and thought of you.”

  This too was apparently news to her husband, who now had another riddle to ascend before he’d even established a toehold on the first.

  “I had a distant relative in the hospital,” Eileen went on. “She didn’t recognize me at first. I almost didn’t recognize her either. I was glad I went anyway.”

  By now the little man had made it almost into our presence, and his brow was furrowed with perplexity. “How’d she turn out?” he said.

  Eileen faced him now as she might have to confront a child who isn’t trying. “She died!”

  The man reacted as if to a stiff jab. “Well, it wasn’t me who killed her,” he said.

  “Ben,” Eileen said, “this is Ned. You can talk to him for five minutes. Then leave him alone.”

  “Sure, babe
,” Ben said, checking his watch.

  “Mike looks like he could use a hand,” Eileen said, and before I could say anything, she’d gathered half a dozen empty glasses and returned them to the bar. I couldn’t help smiling to myself, remembering how she’d fallen to at Jack Ward’s funeral. And wondering as I often had, what, if anything, Eileen had told her son about his father’s identity. My own father, despite his “probablies,” didn’t seem to know for sure it was Jack Ward, and it seemed doubtful that Eileen would have told Drew. But had she, in a moment of lonely pride and need, told the boy that his father was not someone to be ashamed of, but rather a wealthy, important man? Had the boy picked up and catalogued a detail at a time from her offhanded remarks (It’s his father he gets his good looks from, not me) ending up with a composite sketch that Jack Ward fit? Perhaps. But if it was Jack Ward, it now occurred to me, then in all probability Eileen had nothing to do with her son’s terrible knowledge. It would have been his father, acting on an impulse at once redemptive and self-destructive, who was responsible. I suddenly saw Jack Ward behind the wheel of the first of his shiny new Lincolns pulling into Eileen’s steep drive, and encountering there on the porch a boy of six or seven with dark, liquid eyes, a boy who at that age was already wondering. And when he saw this strange, handsome man at the wheel of the shiny car, the boy felt something undeniable tightening inside him. This is the one, they would both have thought at the same precise moment, and when Jack Ward lost his nerve and quickly backed the Lincoln out into the street before the boy’s mother saw, he could never have suspected that those dark, liquid eyes had already etched him too deeply, that this boy would remember and follow, years later, just as the boy’s mother, inside, could have had no way of knowing that she’d lost her son forever.

  This was the way it must have happened, or so it seemed to me that afternoon of my own father’s send-off. I watched Eileen as she gathered glasses efficiently, putting right the mess, and thought it a shame that a lifetime of falling to didn’t get you more, though it had apparently gotten her Ben, who now, instead of facing me, had turned so as to stand shoulder to shoulder with me, flexing at the knees, as if to suggest that he’d decided in my favor. If a fight broke out, he’d be with me, I could count on it. “Ned …” he said thoughtfully. “And what kind of name would that be?”