The Risk Pool (17 page)

“Doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s just there.
Been
there for a hell of a while. You couldn’t spend it all if you tried.”

I frowned at what seemed a silly observation. Of
course
you could
spend
it, I thought, and I said as much, too.

My father shook his head. “You couldn’t do it,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You just couldn’t,” he elaborated. “Jack’s trying like hell, and even he can’t. Which means it can’t be done.”

It turned out that Jack Ward was an old army buddy of my father’s who had married into about the wealthiest family in the county and become a rich man. Since then, according to my father, he was trying to become a poor one again by throwing away money with both fists. But every time he thought he was making headway he discovered there was even more money than he’d thought. “Like shoveling shit against the tide,” my father concluded pessimistically.

It struck me as an interesting problem to have, nevertheless. It shed new light on the forty dollars my mother had had me bring from the bank every week for us to live on. It had seemed a large sum, and I’d always wished I could be master of it for just one week, because I was convinced I could make it go a lot farther than she did. In fact, with forty dollars to live on every week, I had always considered us pretty well-to-do. Maybe there wasn’t money for everything we wanted, but I had figured that was a pretty universal condition. Other people couldn’t be all that much better off. Admittedly, there were people with cars, new ones even, but my mother had given me to believe that the people who owned them made extraordinary sacrifices to afford this single luxury. The fact that we never owned a car was, I believed, a matter of choice. We did not
need
a car, and by not owning one, we were able to enjoy whatever it might be that other people who
did
own them sacrificed. My mother had never been specific about what other people sacrificed, but she insisted they did, and I believed her. When I brought up the Claudes, she just smiled knowingly, and I thought long and hard trying to discover just what secret sacrifices they must have made to maintain a car
and
a swimming pool. About the only other extravagant wealth I’d ever personally encountered was at the dining table in the rectory of Our Lady of Sorrows, but my mother said the church didn’t count. She was talking about
people
.

The idea of having more money than you could spend took
adjusting to, and I considered it for a long time as I vacuumed brittle black hair off Rose’s red pile carpet, my father having fallen asleep in the chair with the racing form over his face. I tried to understand, but there were just too many holes in the theory.

When I was finished, I turned off the noisy vacuum and my father started awake. “He could just
give
some away,” I ventured.

“What?” my father rubbed his eyes.

“The money,” I said. “If you couldn’t spend it all, you could give some to people who didn’t have any and let
them
spend some.”

I could tell by the look on his face that it was a dumb suggestion, so I started on the sinks, sponging the circles of hair toward the drain until the porcelain glistened white. Then, together, we dusted the tables and rearranged the magazines and emptied the dozen or so small trash buckets. It was a long job, but with two of us working it went faster and, besides, I was getting paid. Not the sort of sum Jack Ward would have trouble spending, but a good-sized chunk by my own standards.

“Take that trash down to the basement and you’re all done,” my father said.

When I shouldered the big bag and headed for the back door, he stopped me and said not to be a dummy. I should use the elevator like a white man. When I pointed out that the grid was locked, he said I had a key, didn’t I? Well? And sure enough, the key I’d been given for the back door fit the lock on the gate, which lunged open when released as if on a well-greased, downhill track. I got on the elevator and pressed “B.”

The doors opened again on a long, dark room with a low ceiling and glistening walls. A row of tall metal garbage cans lined the far wall, and in the largest of these I deposited my plastic bag full of hair and nail-polished tissues. When the elevator doors closed, I was left in total darkness and when I got back to the elevator I discovered I could not locate the button that would reopen them. I ran my hands up and down the adjacent walls, trying not to panic, but feeling fear rise in my throat anyway. It was terribly quiet there in the dark and when the big furnace clanged on a few feet away, I nearly cried out.

There was no use banging on the doors, because my father was four floors up and, besides, I was nearly as frightened of needing to be rescued as of being trapped in the dark. After a while he would begin to wonder what had become of me and investigate. The elevator doors would open and the light from inside would
clearly illuminate the button I could not find in the dark. It would be in plain sight, right where it should be, right where any dummy but me could find it.

I knew it had to there, but I could not locate the button. I ran my fingers up and down the doors and walls, like a blind man reading Braille, but all they encountered was smooth, damp brick and steel. I went over the whole area around the doors several times, cursing inwardly, then finally crying tears of exasperation. Find it, dummy, I said aloud. It’s
right
here. It has to be.

Finally, I decided on another tack. Feeling further along the wall, I started searching for a light switch, telling myself there had to be one in a basement with no windows. What I found instead, about ten feet from the elevator, was a wooden door that opened on a stairwell with a handrail, just barely visible. A faint light was coming from somewhere above, so I started slowly up the narrow stair, using the handrail as a guide. At the top there was a landing, then a right turn, then another flight. At the top of the stairs my heart plummeted when I saw that the passage ended at a single door, beneath which was a slender ribbon of light. Surely, it would be locked.

But when I tried the knob, the door creaked inward and I found myself on the threshold of Klein’s Department Store, ground floor. Aisle upon symmetrical aisle stretched before me. The store was unlit except for the sunlight streaming in the long showcase windows a few feet away. In the nearest stood the boy mannequin wearing my clothes, his arms still extended outward, as if to embrace passersby on the street. From behind, he appeared awkward, paralytic, as if he were about to pitch forward through the glass. I let the door swing shut, the darkness suddenly welcome.

There in the dark stairwell I remembered the conversation I’d had with my father in the convertible on the way home from The Lookout. We had left Tree and Alice inside, and I’d asked my father about something that had been puzzling me. “What will he
do
with them?” I said, referring to the roll of admission tickets Tree had said would disappear from the guard shack at the end of the season.

“Keep them,” my father explained. “Then next summer when it gets good and busy, he’ll bring in eight or ten a day. People expect a ticket when they pay, so he’ll give them one. Not from the new season’s roll. They’re numbered. The boss counts how many are given out every day. The money for those goes right in
the drawer where it’s supposed to. The money from the old tickets will go into Tree’s pocket.”

He let me think about it for a while. “Well?” he said.

“It’s dishonest,” I said finally.

“Uh huh,” he admitted. “And?”

When I didn’t know what he meant by the question, he clarified it. “So what?”

I made my way back down the stairs to the basement and emerged from the stairwell just as the elevator doors opened. My father was framed by the interior light, his black finger on the button that held the door open. “Well?” he said. “You decide to stay down here?”

He was grinning, and I saw there
was
no button outside the elevator. The wall was as blank and featureless as it had felt in the dark. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the elevator could not be summoned from below.

I got in.

“What’s the matter?” my father said.

“Nothing,” I said angrily.

The elevator strained upward.

“You wanted me to leave you down there in the dark, is that it?”

“Yes,” I said through my teeth, staring straight ahead at the stupid control panel on the elevator wall, hating it blackly, hating the way it worked, hating him too. “Yes.”

We got along all right, most of the time. During the week my father worked on a new road up in Speculator, and he was usually gone in the morning before I got up for school. He returned around seven, having stopped for a couple of quick ones on the way down the mountain. Then we’d eat hamburg steak dinners
across the street at the Mohawk Grill where there were plenty of people my father knew to keep us company. He was held in high esteem by just about everybody there because he had a good-paying job outside of Mohawk, unlike the rest of the men, who worked, when they could get work, in the few remaining tanneries and glove shops. They also liked him because he was an easy touch and had a lousy memory. Seldom did our dinner go uninterrupted by some hangdog supplicant, hands shoved deep into baggy trouser pockets, hovering over our Formica table, making obligatory small talk before wondering if maybe, Sammy, you could spare ten, because things weren’t so hot and there wasn’t any food in the house for the kids and, Jesus, was this any way for an able-bodied man to have to live … in Mohawk … in fucking Mohawk, excuse the language in front of your boy, but is this any way for a man to live? Then my father, who did not own a wallet, would fish in the pocket of his work pants for the folded wad of bills he kept in no particular sequence—tens, ones, fives—and peel off a couple, sliding them across the table unobtrusively so that the other men in the diner didn’t have to know that it was a touch taking place and not just talk about the Giants, though they must have had a pretty good idea and some were probably thinking about their own prospects. Then the supplicant, always slightly more erect in posture for the infusion of cash, would tell my father to look for him come Friday, and my father would say sure, all right, Friday. He would often run into the same man later that night in Greenie’s or The Glove or one of the countless other twelve-stool bars where a ten-dollar bill bought a man-sized share of camaraderie and oblivion at fifteen cents a draft, forty-five cents a shot.

If my father didn’t turn up by seven or so, I usually made myself a sandwich out of the small refrigerator and prepared for an evening alone. On such nights he would not careen in until after the bars closed. Then he would piss for about five minutes in the general vicinity of the commode before falling asleep on the sofa with his mouth wide open. He had traded in the ragged old couch for an equally suspect model with just as many miles, but which converted, by a tricky, complicated process, into a double bed. On late nights, however, he was unequal to a task requiring so much dexterity, and since comfort wasn’t the issue he usually decided the hell with it. Four hours or so later, the alarm having wound down to a feeble tinkle, he would jolt awake with a loud
“Ah!” and go pee again, with even greater urgency and, blessedly, accuracy. Finding himself still dressed from the night before, there would be nothing to do but stumble down to the Mercury, trusting the cold wind to air him out and sober him up. It was asking a lot, even with the top down.

On still other evenings we drove over to Eileen’s. Usually, we’d stop at a market and buy a big package of pork chops and a couple cans of creamed corn to take with us, and Eileen Littler would fry the chops in butter and oregano and mash a half dozen potatoes into huge white mounds. Eileen, it turned out, was a direct lineal descendant of Nathan Littler, the town father, and his fabled sister Myrtle, whose park Eileen’s small brown house sat at the edge of. The decline of the Littler family more or less paralleled that of Mohawk itself. Eileen excepted, the two dozen or so Littlers remaining in the county now lived, albeit marginally, on public assistance, which permitted them lives as full of leisure as their privileged ancestors. According to Eileen, who always held down at least two jobs and hadn’t much use for her relatives, they’d all inherited a lazy gene. Her own industry, however, did not prevent her from being equated with the rest of the Littlers, and she herself was viewed as an object lesson in moral decline.

Right before the war, Eileen was said to have gone a little wild, and half a dozen surprised local boys claimed she was sending them into battle with at least one thing to be grateful for. When she disappeared from Mohawk, rumor had it that she’d followed one of these boys to an army camp in Savannah. But she was gone a long time, and when she reappeared she had a baby on her hip. Some maintained that she had married down south, others that her timing had been bad, and that she would have to await the end of the war to marry the child’s father. And there were those who said that her timing was pretty good, that she’d had the war years to decide who she wanted the father to be, to see who made it back and in what condition. When the news of the surrender reached Mohawk, people remarked that Eileen Littler was as full of anticipation as any of the town’s young wives-in-good-standing, but for her these exciting months passed uneventfully, and no young soldier came to claim Eileen or her son. When she enrolled the boy in grade school, he had his mother’s name, Littler, now thoroughly and finally besmirched. In place of the lazy gene, Eileen had inherited a stubborn, circumspect one, and if the
matter of the boy’s paternity remained an open question for the curious, they knew better than to raise that question to her face.

This new degenerate breed of Littlers all died penniless, and were buried in the county section of the cemetery, far from the huge black marble obelisk that marked the grave of their distant ancestor. My father told her not to worry. As soon as she died he’d have her cremated, have the ashes put in a mason jar, which he’d bury in a little hole under the black obelisk. “Right on top of old Nathan,” he promised, “so you’ll have someone to talk to.”