The Risk Pool (3 page)

Mohawk didn’t see my father again for nearly six years, and my mother never got over what you could buy with fifty dollars, invested wisely.

Even as a child, I never had much use for conventional honesty. I can’t remember my first lie, but I do recall the first one I was caught at. Many years later when I was at the university, I confessed it to a young woman I was infatuated with, and she used me for a case study in her psych class, in return for which I got to use her for nonacademic advantage. Here’s the story I told her. The true story, more or less, of my first imaginative untruth.

I was a first grader in McKinley Elementary School (kindergarten was optional and we hadn’t opted), and word had gotten around among the other children that my father did not live with
my mother and me, an unusual circumstance in 1953 and one which made me the center of attention that September, the Mohawk Fair being over, and no real freaks (like the Heroin Monster: “See her, you’ll want to kill her!”) to gawk at for another year. My mother instructed me to say only that it was nobody’s business where my father lived, which suggests how little she understood children if she thought such a lame response would have any effect other than the inflaming of their natural, arrogant curiosity. Happily, I arrived at a more sensible solution to my problem. I informed everyone that my father was dead, and the beneficial effect of this intelligence I felt immediately. I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself.

One day, not long after I began telling this lie, however, my teacher, Miss Holiday, took me by the hand and led me outside while the other children, obediently curled up on mats, had been instructed to nap. There at the curb was a lone, dirty white convertible. Inside was a man, and when he leaned across the front seat to open the passenger-side door, my heart did something funny and I stopped right where I was, Miss Holiday pressing up against me from behind. The man in the car had a gray chin, and the fingers that first encircled the steering wheel, then came toward me to release the door lock, were black and calloused. A cigarette dangled carelessly from the man’s lips, and bobbed when he spoke. “Thanks, young lady,” my father said.

Miss Holiday wasn’t pressing against me anymore. Maybe she too was looking at his black fingers. “I don’t know about this,” she said. “I could lose my job.”

“Nah,” my father said, and perhaps his failure to elaborate why not was just the right thing, because she suddenly nudged me into the car and scurried back up the walk.

“Well?” said my father. I’ve often wondered whether he was as sure that I was his son as I was that he was my father. There was little enough physical resemblance at that stage. My hair was blond and curly, his wiry and black and bushy. Did he think that maybe the fool of a young woman had grabbed the wrong kid, or did he feel something when he saw me that said this is the one? “You know who I am?”

I nodded.

“Can you talk?”

I nodded again, feeling my eyes fill.

“Who am I?”

I couldn’t force anything out, couldn’t look at him, except for the black thumb and finger which pressed the life out of the burning cigarette and deposited the stub in the full ashtray.

“All right,” he said. “Who are
you
?”

“Ned,” I gulped.

“Ned Who?”

“Ned Hall.”

“Right. You know where the name Hall came from?”

I shook my head. He was lighting another cigarette, and when he had done it, he tossed the still burning match into an ashtray, the flame inching down the cardboard stem, leaving it as black as my father’s thumb and forefinger.

“Your mother tell you to say I was dead?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t lie to me.”

I began to cry, because I wasn’t lying.

“She’ll wish she hadn’t,” he said. “You can bet your ass.”

He sat and smoked and couldn’t think of anything else to ask me. “You want to go back to school or do you want some ice cream at the dairy?”

I reached for the door handle, which I couldn’t get to move. The black fingers came over and did it. By the time I got back inside, I was shaking so badly that Miss Holiday took me to see the nurse, who examined me, and finding a low-grade fever decided to drive me home. As we turned the corner onto my street, a white convertible fishtailed away from the curb and away up the hill, just as a police car appeared at the rise coming in the opposite direction. Several neighbors were out on their porches and pointed the way of the fleeing convertible, and the patrol car did a clumsy, two-stage U-turn.

“This means war,” my mother said when she finally got calmed down. Her eyes were glowing like the tip of my father’s cigarette.

War it was.

My mother was game, at least in the beginning. Every time he turned up—he averaged twice a week—she called the cops. For my father’s part, it was a guerrilla war, hit and run, in and out. His favorite time was three in the morning below my mother’s window, drunk often as not, and ready to kick up a hell of a fuss before vanishing into the night thirty seconds before the cops
pulled up. He had a drunk’s radar where cops were concerned. One night during the second week of his marauding, a policeman was stationed around back after dark, so my father phoned instead of putting in a personal appearance. “How long is that fat cop planning to squat in the bushes back there?” he asked my mother. “You better draw your blinds, I know
that
son of a bitch.” In fact, he knew them all, and that was the problem. Every time a policeman was assigned to us, my father knew about it. Usually, he knew which one.

Nobody seemed able to find out where he was living, though rumor had it that he was working road construction down the line in Albany. His nocturnal visits continued all summer, and by the end of August my mother was done in. At first he just accused her of instructing me to tell everybody he was dead, but he had other gripes too. He’d had a good look at me in the car that day, and he didn’t like the way I was turning out. In his opinion she was turning me into a little pussy. And speaking of pussy, he heard she’d been seen around town.

This last accusation was beyond everything. In the six years he’d been gone, my mother might as well have been a nun. She could count the dates she’d had on one hand, she said. “That’s not the point,” he said. His long absence did not strike him as a mitigating circumstance, any more than did their mutual lack of tender feeling for each other. “You’re my wife,” he said. “And as long as you are, stay the hell home where you belong.”

As I look back on this period in our troubled lives, what astonishes me is how little the trouble touched me. My father’s nocturnal raids seldom woke me fully, and the next morning I was only vaguely aware that something had happened during the night. On such mornings my mother always questioned me about how I’d slept, and when I said fine, her expression was equal parts relief and astonishment that it was possible for anybody to sleep through what invariably woke the neighbors. Probably I willed myself to sleep through those episodes, too afraid to wake up. I remember that summer as a nervous time. I was always on the lookout for the white convertible and under explicit instructions to run inside and tell my mother if it appeared.

That year must have been a lonely one for my mother, who had to work all day at the phone company, then come home and endure the horror of being awakened in the middle of the night, sometimes out of sheer anticipation. She had no one to share her
burdens with, your average six-year-old being an imperfect confidant. To make matters worse, she had scruples about the way she dealt with my father and even about the way she portrayed him to me. “No, he isn’t a bad man,” she responded to my surprise question one day. “He wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt you. He’s just careless. He wouldn’t look out for you the way I do.”

I thought about him a lot that winter, though the cold weather and deep snow discouraged him from beneath my mother’s bedroom window. The few minutes I’d spent with him in the dirty white convertible had somehow changed everything, not that I could have explained how or why. It was as if I suddenly understood intuitively nameless things I hadn’t missed before becoming aware of them. I kept seeing his black thumb and forefinger snuffing out the red cigarette tip, a gesture I practiced with candy cigarettes until my mother caught me at it and wanted to know what I was doing. I knew better than to explain.

It wasn’t that I loved him, of course. But when I thought about my father, my heart did that same funny thing it had done that afternoon he leaned across the front seat of the car and threw open the passenger-side door.

In the yard behind our house was a maple that had been planted by my grandfather before the war. It was a small boy’s dream. I lived to climb it. Its trunk was too thick to shinny up, but a makeshift ladder of two-by-four chunks had been nailed into it, and these brought the climber as far as the crotch, about six feet up, where the tree divided, unequally, the dwarf side rising about halfway up the house, the healthy dominant side to a much higher altitude.

I was forbidden to climb the tree after the day my mother came out onto the back porch, called my name, and my voice drifted down to her from second story level, at the very top of the tree’s dwarf side. I swung down from branch to branch to show off my dexterity. My mother wasn’t impressed. “If I ever catch you in that tree again …” she said. She either liked unfinished sentences or couldn’t think of how to finish them, and I resented her unwillingness to spell out consequences. It was impossible to weigh alternatives without them. But I was an obedient boy and did as I was told whenever she was around.

After school got out at 3:30, my mother’s cousin—Aunt Rose, I
called her—looked after me until quarter of five when my mother got home from the phone company. Aunt Rose’s little house was around the corner and up the street from where we lived, halfway between my school and home. She fed me macaroons and we laughed immoderately at Popeye the Sailor. Aunt Rose also liked professional wrestling on Saturday afternoons, though her face got red with moral indignation at what some of the contestants got away with and how blind the referees were. Weekdays, after Olive Oyl was rescued, I headed home to await my mother on the front porch. Ours was probably the only house in Mohawk that was always locked. The only one that needed to be, my mother said. I knew why, though I wasn’t supposed to. It was to keep my father out.

The fifteen minutes between 4:30 and 4:45 was my time in the tree. Each day I dared a little higher, the slender upper branches bending beneath my seven-year-old weight. I was convinced that if I could make it to the top of the tree, I would be able to look out over the roof of my grandfather’s house, beyond Third Avenue, across all of Mohawk. I quickly mastered the dwarf side, but I was afraid to try the other. The branch I needed in order to begin was just beyond my reach, even when I stood on tiptoe in the crotch below. Although no great leap was necessary, my knees always got weak and I was afraid. If I failed to grab hold of the limb, I would fall all the way to the ground.

Day after day I stood sorrowfully in the crotch, staring into the center of the tree, immobile, full of self-hate and terrible yearning, until my mental clock informed me that my mother’s ride would deposit her on the terrace any minute. The ground felt soft as a pillow when I swung down, and I knew I was a coward.

One afternoon, as I stood there, gazing up into that dark green and speckled blue height, I was suddenly aware that I was being watched, and when I turned, he stood there on the back porch, leaning forward with his arms on the railing. I could tell he’d been there for some time, and I was even more ashamed than other days when there were no witnesses. I knew when I saw him standing there that I had never intended to jump.

“Well?” he said.

And that one word was all it took. I don’t remember jumping. Suddenly, I just had a hold of the limb with both hands, then had a knee over, then with a heave, I was up. The rest of the way
would be easy, I knew, and I didn’t care about it. I could do it any day.

“You better come down,” my father said. “Your mother catches you up there, she’ll skin us both.”

Even as he spoke, we heard a car pull up out front. I swung down lickety-split.

“You figure you can keep a secret?” he said.

When I said sure, he nimbly vaulted the porch railing and landed next to me, so close we could have touched. Then he was gone.

A week later he kidnapped me.

I had left Aunt Rose’s and was on my way home when I saw the white convertible. It was coming toward me up the other side of the street, traveling fast. I didn’t think it would stop, but it did. At the last moment it swerved across the street to my side and came to a rocking halt, one wheel over the curb.

“What’s the matter?” my father wanted to know. I must have looked like something was the matter. He had a gray chin again and his hair looked crazy until he ran his black fingers through it, which helped only a little.

I said nothing was the matter.

“You want to go for a ride?”

I figured he must mean to the dairy for ice cream.

“Come here,” he said.

I started around the car to the passenger side.

“Here,” he repeated. “You know what ‘here’ means?”

Actually, I don’t think I did. At least I couldn’t figure out what good it would do me to walk over and stand next to him outside the car. I found out though, because suddenly he had me under the arms, and then I was high in the air, above the convertible’s
windshield, where I rotated 180 degrees and plopped into the seat beside him. My teeth clicked audibly, but other than that it was a smooth landing.

He put the convertible in gear and we thumped down off the curb and up the street past Aunt Rose’s in the opposite direction from the dairy. I figured he’d turn around when we got to the intersection, but he didn’t. We just kept on going, straight out of Mohawk. My father’s hair was wild again, and mine was too, I could feel it.

The car smelled funny. My father didn’t seem aware of it until finally he sniffed and said, “Ah, shit,” and pulled over so that he was half on the road and half on the shoulder. First he flung up the hood, then the trunk. With the hood up, the funny burning smell was even worse. My father got two yellow cans out of the trunk and punched holes in them. Then he unscrewed a cap on the engine and poured in the contents of the two cans. In the gap between the dash and the hood I could see his black fingers working. I thought about my mother, who would be just about putting her key in the front door lock and wondering how come I wasn’t on the front porch to greet her. I started to send her a telepathic thought, “I’m with my father,” until I remembered that the message wouldn’t exactly comfort her should she receive it.