The Risk Pool (21 page)

“Give your goddamn
kid
a break, too,” Untemeyer said. His own business generally tailed off when Harry’s did. “How the hell do you put up with him twenty-four hours a day? Tell me that.”

I shrugged. In truth, I probably saw less of him than Untemeyer himself. There was school, of course, until the middle of the afternoon, and after dinner he’d usually disappear, sometimes to play
poker, sometimes to visit The Elms to see Eileen and talk to Mike, the bartender. About the only time I saw him was in the late afternoon, like now. I could usually figure on finding him at Harry’s when I got off school. Sometimes, we’d eat dinner there. Other times at Eileen’s. If he wasn’t around, I’d eat dinner by myself in the apartment overlooking the gray, deserted Main Street below.

Of the three, I most hated those dinners at Eileen’s because they were like sitting atop a powderkeg. When my father had money, we’d stop at the market and buy groceries to bring with us. Lately, though, he’d been taking a beating at the poker table and the bookmakers’, which meant that when we turned up, it would be empty-handed. That wouldn’t have bothered him so much if it didn’t rob my father of his trump card with Eileen’s son Drew, whom my father rode hard about freeloading off his mother. “It must be supper time,” my father would say when we’d hear the motorcycle, usually still a couple blocks down the street.

“Lay off of him,” Eileen would warn.

Lately, my father didn’t have much to say, though that, it seemed to me, actually increased the tension, because Drew Littler sensed that for the moment, anyway, he had the upper hand. The last time we’d gone over to the Littlers’ for dinner, the cycle had been parked in the garage and Drew had lifted his blond head from a comic book when we came in and called out, “Must be supper time,” to his mother.

That had been over a week ago, and we hadn’t been back since.

My father dug into his pocket and came up with two folded bills, tossing one on the table in front of me. “Well?” he said.

I picked up the dollar bill and studied it. “Liars” was one of our favorite pastimes. Played with the serial numbers of dollar bills, the game developed some of the same intellectual rigors as handicapping horses. If you said four fives and there were only two fives on
your
dollar bill, then there had better be two more on the bill your opponent was holding. If there weren’t, and you were called upon to produce the four fives you’d claimed the existence of, you lost your bill. The idea was to trick your opponent into making a claim he’d have to support entirely on his own. If you could convince him that your bill contained, say, threes, and it was in reality devoid of threes, you could challenge him later if he claimed to have an inordinate number of them. It was a wicked
little game that placed a premium on confident bluffing, misdirection and rapid analysis of probability.

“What am I going to do with you if I go someplace for a while?”

I shrugged and called three deuces.

He studied his bill disinterestedly. “Three fives.”

“Three eights,” I said, holding my breath. There wasn’t a single eight on my bill; I was hoping to trap him into coming back to eights later on. I did have three fives, but fives were what he’d just called and he might be using the same strategy on me.

“Four fives,” he said.

“Four eights,” I said, a little too quickly, trying to sound casual.

“Your ass, four eights,” he said, but we always played strict rules. You had to say “liar.” “I know you’re not telling the truth, but I’ll let you skate this once because I’ve got five fives.”

He had me and I knew it. I had three fives myself. No way he’d believe five eights. My only hope was that he too had three fives. That would make six between us.

“Six fives,” I said.

He was nodding and flicking his tubed-up bill with his black thumb and forefinger. “You better have five of them, you liar.”

He unrolled his bill and showed it to me. One measly five. “If I could chain you in the basement and play you for a living, I wouldn’t have to worry about working.” That was one of his favorite lines, and he used it whenever we played Liars. When I won, which was seldom, he always accused me of having a no-brainer bill, the kind that had maybe four deuces on it and you couldn’t lose with it.

“I’d be all right,” I said, though I hoped he wouldn’t go anywhere.

He ran his hands through his hair. “Well, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll make out, somehow. White people don’t starve in America.”

I wasn’t worried about starving. I’d been banking practically all of the money I made cleaning Rose’s and could have loaned my father a couple hundred dollars if there had been a good enough reason to. But then we really would be broke, and I preferred to let him just think we were. I’d save us if I had to, but not until I became convinced there was no other way. Right now we were only a hundred or so into Harry and two months behind on rent. The situation was far from desperate.

Before we left, my father boxed a number with Untemeyer (he
always had a dollar for that purpose) and then we crossed the street to our apartment, climbing the two dark flights of stairs. The local news was on when we came in. I watched while my father read the sports in the morning paper that Harry let him take with us. When the weatherman came on, he talked about how cold it was everywhere, even the desert Southwest, which was recording its lowest temperatures on record. They showed pictures of Phoenix, Arizona.

“Look at the goddamn snow,” my father said seriously, as if snow were not a permanent condition on our television set. I was mentally adding up how much he would have lost if anybody had taken his wager.

He must have been doing the same, because he shook his head and said, “Some fucking thing’s gotta give here. And quick, too.”

A few days later my father’s personal fortunes took a turn for the better. Suddenly, there was money. Harry eyed him suspiciously as my father peeled bills off a sizable roll, but he took the money and that squared us at the Mohawk Grill. He also paid our back rent, along with the next month’s, thus guaranteeing that we’d be all right until he started work in the spring. The only other thing was to pay his bar tabs, especially the one at The Elms. He’d stopped going there when it got too steep, not wanting to embarrass Eileen. “Not that Mike gives a shit,” he told me. “Mike’s all right.”

Mike was my favorite bartender. Whenever my father and I came in on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, he rang up No Sale and slapped a couple quarters on the bar for the jukebox so I could play Elvis and my own personal favorite, Duane Eddy. He let me sit at the bar, too, which I didn’t always get to do in some of the lesser dives my father brought me to. My father explained that in the better joints you didn’t have to worry because the cops stayed away unless they were called. In places like Greenie’s, where the men from the mills drank, the bartenders had to be careful, but Mike said never mind cops, as if he weren’t convinced of their existence. Sit at the bar. Eat peanuts. Watch the ball game. Anybody doesn’t like it, tough. Mike had the shiniest black hair I’d ever seen. His fingers were pink and elegant, his nails scrubbed white. He always ignored my father, speaking first to me. “So,” he would say. “How’s he treating you?”

When I said good, he’d remind me that I didn’t have to live with such a stiff if I didn’t want to. I could come live with him and his wife upstairs over the restaurant. Today, though, he put his hand over his heart and pretended to stagger when he saw us.

My father nodded knowingly. “If I had all your money, I’d have a weak ticker too. I’d be scared somebody else might get a dollar or two.”

We took stools near the end of the empty bar. Mike put a quarter in front of me.

“Take it,” my father said. “It’s his one good deed. When was the last time you bought a drink?”

“VJ Day,” Mike said.

My father tossed three twenties on the bar.

“Sweet rollickin’ Jesus,” Mike said. “Go back out and come in again.”

“Our friend working tonight?”

“She’s off Thursdays. You know that.”

“I forget.”

Mike held one of the twenties up to the light, fingering it with his thumb and forefinger. “I heard somebody’d knocked over a Brink’s car yesterday. I never made the connection.”

“We got time for a quick one, I guess,” my father said. Mike drew my father a tall glass of beer and poured a 7-Up for me while I was busy punching three songs into the jukebox.

“So who’s this?” my father said when Duane Eddy came on. He always wanted to know who Duane Eddy was.

Mike broke one of my father’s twenties, put the change on the bar. My father pushed it back at him, along with the other two twenties. “Let’s settle up,” he said.

Mike took twenty-five, left the rest.

“What?” My father frowned.

“That’s it,” Mike said. “We’re square.”

“Not close,” my father said. “Let me see.”

“Trust me,” Mike insisted, but his eyes looked nervous to me.

“Let me see,” my father said.

Mike rang another No Sale and lifted the register drawer. Beneath it were a couple dozen tabs. Mike went through them till he found the one with my father’s name on it.

My father surveyed the tab. The largest number, about midway down the column, was fifty-five, but it had been crossed out, along with each of the numbers beneath it, except for the last, which was twenty-five. Mike was red-faced.

“So what the hell’s going on?” my father asked.

“Take it up with your benefactor.”

“You took money from her?”

“She tells me it’s from you. How the hell do I know? You disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Drink your soda,” my father told me.

“Don’t go getting sore for Christ’s sake,” Mike pleaded.

“Did you ask her for money?”

“Jesus, Sammy.”

“If I find out you did …”

Mike threw up his hands. “She says it’s from you. What do I know? Your old man’s a knothead,” he said to me.

“Bullshit,” my father said, his eyes still narrow slits. I sucked the last of my 7-Up through the straw.

“Have some dinner,” Mike said when he saw we were really going to leave. “You and the boy. I’ll spring.”

My father left the twenty-five on the bar. “
You
give it back to her. And tell her you had no business taking it to begin with.”

“Sure, Sammy. Whatever you say. Suit yourself.”

“I will,” my father said. “I do.”

We stopped at the market on the way to Eileen’s. My father wasn’t saying anything, and I knew what that meant. At the store he slung expensive roasts into the cart, causing people to stop and look at us suspiciously. By the time we got to the checkout though, the purple had begun to drain from his face, and he stacked the meat in a careful pyramid on the counter.

“How are you, young lady,” he said to the girl at the register, who was too bored to answer.

My father nudged me, his favorite conspiratorial gesture. My part in such conspiracies was always the same. To get nudged. I’d come to the conclusion it was all he thought I could handle. “Whatever became of the child labor laws in this state?” he said.

The girl did not seem to think that this remark applied to her. I didn’t see how it could myself. She was small-boned, but hardly a kid.

He nudged me again. “I’ll give you a dollar for every year over sixteen,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

The girl rang the total, just over sixty dollars worth of standing rib, rolled pork roasts, hams, family-sized packages of ground
beef, all bleeding profusely. The girl made a face, said “yecch,” and dried her hands before bagging. “I’m twenty-five,” she told us.

“You’re just saying that so my son won’t ask you out,” he said, nudging me again.

Actually, she looked more apprehensive that
he
would. By the time she was done bagging, she had bloody hands again, and she reiterated her “yecch,” as if her condition were our fault.

“It
will
wash off, you know,” my father said.

She might have believed that if she hadn’t spied his black thumb and forefinger, which may have looked to her like the natural result of bagging too many bloody sirloin tip roasts.

My father wheeled the convertible out of the parking lot and up First toward Myrtle Park. “She’s a pretty good girl,” he said. “You ever get a chance to do her a favor, you do it.”

For a moment I thought he was referring, inexplicably, to the checkout girl back at the market. Then I realized it was Eileen he was thinking about and probably had been thinking about since we left The Elms.

“She’s not pretty, like your mother,” he conceded, as if he imagined I’d found his preference in the matter puzzling. I turned and stared out the window, my eyes filling. We’d stopped speaking of my mother by mutual unspoken agreement. My father had brought me to visit her in the Albany hospital only once. I’d wished he hadn’t. There’d been even less of her than the Sunday morning at the Old Nathan Littler Hospital when she’d been little more than a ripple of flesh and bone beneath the otherwise placid sea of sheets and blanket. The afternoon we visited her in Albany she had looked like a child, her long hair chopped at the nape of her neck, her arms bruised where she had been hooked up to the machines that monitored her vital signs. A nurse had explained it to me, assuring me that the crisis had passed, unaware that I knew nothing of any crisis, was unaware that her heart had stopped beating briefly during the week and that she’d been revived. Unaware that our turning up that particular weekend had been pure coincidence.

My father had waited in the lobby, and I was too frightened by what I saw to say anything to him. When he asked me how she was I told him good and made up a small conversation about how she’d said she would be coming home soon and that we’d live together again. It was a week later when I learned the details of
my mother’s brush with death. I was summoned to the principal’s office during home room. When I saw F. William Peterson there and the principal said why didn’t we use his office, my throat got tight and I could feel my eyes filling, until the lawyer made me understand that it wasn’t what I thought, that he had come to tell me she was out of immediate danger now and was being transferred to a nursing home in Schenectady, where I could go see her whenever I wanted. I didn’t tell my father about this either.