The Risk Pool (31 page)

“In the woods, you see,” said Hilda Ward. “Be a dear and fetch it.”

“What’s it doing in the woods? Who’s this?”

“Resting,” said his wife. “This young man happens to be our savior, if you want to know … if you can forget your beloved car for the moment.”

“Saved you from what?” Jack Ward said. He stood before us now, hands on his hips, clearly frustrated at not getting the kind of information that genuinely illuminated.

“From Lord knows what,” said Mrs. Ward. “Injury. Disfigurement. Death. Do you care?”

“Of course I bloody care. What do you think?”

“Well, then. That’s gratifying. Do run along and get the car and let us catch our breath. Then, perhaps we’ll tell you about it, since you care.”

The woman’s tone was halfway between mirth and malice, but Jack Ward seemed less puzzled by it than I. “Sweetheart?” he said to his daughter, and the lovely child buried her head in his shirt front. “Oh, Daddy!” she said.

“You run along with your father, dear. Show him where to find his beloved. He mightn’t be able to locate it otherwise, you know. In the meantime, I’ll entertain our savior.”

And with that she took me by the hand—with her own cool and ever-so-dry hand—and led me toward the white jewel house.

* * *

“Something cool” turned out to be a layered green parfait in a glass shaped like a tulip. Mrs. Ward took me into a huge kitchen, where a short, heavyset woman was whaling away at an innocent piece of pale pink meat with a wooden hammer. She did not look happy to see us.

“This is Mrs. Petrie,” Tria’s mother told me with a wave of her hand in that woman’s general direction. “Mrs. P., meet the young man who just saved our lives.”

Mrs. P. looked like, if this happened by some strange chance to be true, she would have had me summarily strangled by way of reward.

“Do you imagine,” Mrs. Ward went on, apparently unmoved by the other woman’s murderous expression, “that something cool might be given him? Something ice cream, you know, or something soda? He could sit right here, I think, don’t you?”

There was a large wooden island right in the center of the kitchen, and it was ringed on three sides by tall stools. Overhead, suspended from the ceiling, hung a wrought iron circle from which a dozen or so gleaming copper pots and pans in a variety of sizes hung. Mrs. Ward had directed me to a stool directly beneath a still dripping one.

“Quite a harrowing experience, actually,” she told Mrs. Petrie, without the slightest intention, apparently, of going into detail. Which was probably just as well, since the other woman gave no evidence of the slightest curiosity. “But we have excellent cause to congratulate ourselves that no one was … you know. Such terrible things sometimes happen to people.”

Mrs. Ward appeared to be searching her memory for an illustration, but apparently Drew Littler, who might have qualified, it seemed to me, had already vanished from her consciousness. When, after a fleeting moment, she couldn’t think of anything terrible that ever happened to anyone, she gave up the project and remembered me. “Well now,” she said, “enjoy your … you know, and.…”

And then she was gone, leaving me in the big kitchen with Mrs. Petrie, whose expression softened only slightly when the other woman disappeared. I got my parfait and a long-handled spoon to negotiate the tulip glass. Mrs. Petrie watched me eat the first mouthful, probably to see if I’d make a face, so I didn’t. Actually,
it tasted pretty good, especially the green minty part. While I ate, she whacked away at the meat until it was thin, then divided it into squares and placed these in a puddle of what smelled like vinegar. After wrapping the bowl in cellophane the whole thing went into the refrigerator.

“I hope she didn’t expect me to stay here till you finish that,” she said, though in truth I was only a spoonful from the bottom. “I was supposed to be home half an hour ago. I don’t suppose it would ever occur to her that I might have a family of my own to cook for or that they get hungry about the same time as other people.”

From where I was sitting, I had a view of the drive and I saw the Lincoln emerge from the trees and pass between the stone pillars. Jack Ward was at the wheel, Tria, white-faced, beside him.

Mrs. Petrie disappeared into a small room off the kitchen, then reappeared struggling into a lightweight raincoat. Her handbag she grabbed from atop the refrigerator. “I spect they’ll be in in a minute,” she said, “less they forget about you, which they might. There’s a half dozen more of those in the freezer and nobody around here ever counts a blessed thing. Eat them all if you want. Keep the glasses. Take home anything you like.”

I studied her in vain for signs of levity. Did she possess some bizarre second sight that had allowed her to size me up as a thief right off? I hoped not, because I had no intention of stealing anything from the Wards. In fact, I’d given up thieving forever, right there in the Ward kitchen. Life had taken a miraculous turn. Just a few short days before I hadn’t been able to imagine ever seeing Tria Ward again, yet here I was eating out of a tulip glass
inside
the very house I’d studied from Myrtle Park and the rear end of Drew Littler’s motorcycle. And I was a savior no less. Tria Ward’s own personal savior. And she would be
my
savior, as well. She would reform me. Once we had professed our love for one another, I would confess how I had sneaked down into Klein’s Department Store back when I was shiftless. She would want to pay it all back, of course, out of her own money, but I’d nix that. I myself would sneak down into the store once a week, slipping ten or twenty into the register until I was an honest man again. By then I would be of marriageable age. I formulated this whole scenario as I sat there beneath the dripping pot.

Outside I saw Jack Ward and his daughter emerge from the garage and from where I sat in the kitchen I got just a glimpse
of Tria as she darted down the hall, where I heard a door open and close.

When her father spied me, he looked puzzled, as if he’d forgotten about me entirely. I stood up. “Sam Hall’s boy, right?” he said.

I admitted it.

“Left you all alone, did they?” he looked around the kitchen.

I shrugged, as if to suggest that this did not matter.

“It happens around here,” he said.

How strange I must have appeared to him, standing there at parade rest in the middle of his big kitchen, waiting for I knew not what. Something.

“There’s a ball game on, probably,” Jack Ward said, though there was no television in sight. “We could watch that.”

I followed him out through the dining room into a smaller one that was walled with bookcases that rose right to the ceiling. Most of them were full of books, though some held expensive-looking knickknacks like the ones I’d stolen to spruce up our old house. I even recognized a piece or two, and I thought it strange that anybody would actually buy pewter goblets and cut glass owls and green bottles wrapped in leather.

There was a television in the corner of the room and Jack Ward turned it on, ripping through channels impatiently. When he didn’t find a ball game, he turned it off again, though I’d have been happy to watch just about anything on a TV with no snow.

“You like to read?” he said.

I said I did. Very much.

He looked around the room with distaste. “Well,” he said, letting the thought trail off. It was my father’s word, but with Jack Ward, you could guess what direction his thought was headed. “Somebody’ll be in in a minute,” he said, without much confidence. And then he too was gone.

Maybe Jack Ward didn’t care for it, but I was never more impressed with a room than I was with that one. I wasn’t even sorry to be left alone in it for a while. It was tight and quiet and good smelling, a contrast to the big, drafty, echoing rooms I lived in with my father. Here each sound had only a moment’s life before it disappeared into the carpet or the tall shelves full of heavy books. There was a stone fireplace along one wall, its polished wooden mantel lined with photographs. The majority of them were pictures of a young Mrs. Ward with a very slender older man who reminded me a little of the photographs of my
grandfather my mother was always showing me when I was a little boy. I have examined these since, and the two men could not have looked more dissimilar, except for their exaggerated slenderness and a rather peculiarly erect carriage. But there was an uncanny resemblance between the young Mrs. Ward of the photographs and her daughter Tria, and I examined each photo for clues to the mother’s transformation from young woman to mummy. There appeared to be no transition, however. In girlhood Mrs. Ward had been light, small, lovely, like Tria, though more pale; then suddenly she was a woman standing there beside the same man, who had appeared not to have aged at all, though his daughter had shrunken in upon herself. There were also pictures of Tria as a little girl, with those same anxious eyes, perched uncomfortably on her grandfather’s lap. Jack Ward himself wasn’t pictured anywhere.

Next to the stone fireplace was a bookcase unlike the others in that one whole shelf was empty except for a thick, leather-bound volume on a stand, opened to the middle, like the big dictionary in the Mohawk Free Library. At the top of each manuscript page was typed, in gray fading letters, “The History of Mohawk County,” just to the right of the author’s name—William Henry Smythe. Since there was nobody to tell me I shouldn’t, I leafed through the brittle pages, discovering that there were nearly seven hundred, all in the same fading gray type. The manuscript was flanked by two red candles in squat gold holders, and the whole arrangement reminded me of the Monsignor’s altar at Our Lady of Sorrows.

As I took all of this in, I became vaguely aware of voices in a remote part of the house. I had been alone in the room for quite some time, and when I opened the door and poked my head out into the dining room to see if anyone was around, the voices were louder. I recognized them as belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Ward, and they were coming from the bedroom farthest down the long corridor. Nearer me, halfway down the hall, the door Tria had disappeared behind was partially ajar, and it moved almost imperceptibly as I watched. When the voices stopped, it closed.

It took me a while to make it back down the road through the pitch-black trees, arms out in front of me like a blind man, with just the sound of the highway below and the feel of the blacktop
to go by. I emerged from the trees just as a car pulled up and let my father out by the convertible. “What a crazy son of a bitch,” he said when I got in. He was referring to Drew Littler, of course, but for a moment I thought maybe he meant me for still being right where he’d left me.

Among my entrepreneurial activities that summer, I salvaged golf balls from the narrow pond that served as a hazard on the thirteenth and fourteenth holes of the Mohawk Country Club. To judge from its location, you wouldn’t have thought it would come into play on either hole, since each offered a wide fairway and every opportunity to go around the water, but I doubted it could have attracted more balls had it been twice as large and right in front of the green. The more people faced away from the water, stared off into the friendly fairway, the more surely their ball would be destined for the pond. One afternoon before it had occurred to me that I might retrieve the balls that were down there, I sat on my bike for three hours and charted in my mind where the tee shots dropped, growing more and more amazed at the dense concentration of shots that ended up in the small strip of water. It was enough to make you reconsider the wisdom of deciding, on the outset of any human endeavor, that there was this one thing you didn’t want to do.

The country club raked the pond on Tuesday nights, reselling the dredged-up balls as “used” the following week, priced according to the size and ugliness of the sneers cut into their dimpled skins. Many were aerodynamically suspect, but perfectly acceptable as “water balls.” People stocked up on them at fifteen cents apiece and seemed almost happy to give them back to the pond. It was easy to bid farewell to a yellowed ball that smiled up at you from the tee.

Since the club conducted its weekly salvage on Tuesdays, I did mine on Mondays, sneaking onto the course around sundown, my gym bag stuffed with mask, snorkel, and flippers, all borrowed from the sporting goods department at Klein’s. I also had a fishing net on a long pole, courtesy of Wussy, who’d jumped to the understandable conclusion that I’d be fishing for fish.

Dusk was not the ideal time of day to snorkel for golf balls, the low slanting rays of the sun producing only vague, ghostly light in the murky pond. Few balls on the weedy bottom showed up until I was right on top of them. Often they would not look like golf balls at all, but rather like brown boils in the sand. They hit the bottom with the force of a small explosion, burrowing out for themselves a small cavity in the silt, which would rise, then filter back down, covering the ball with a thin brown skin. I actually observed the process one evening when an errant tee shot narrowly missed me. As a rule I wouldn’t ease myself into the pond until I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t be interrupted. Mondays were usually slow, and I never started work until the fading light made golf impractical. I always checked out the two preceding holes before stripping down to my trunks and donning my snorkel.

On a good night I’d retrieve enough balls to fill Wussy’s net at least once, though I was careful not to overfish the pond. I always left enough for the club’s Tuesday night raking to avoid undue suspicion, though there must have been some anyway, especially when I set up shop just outside the club’s main gate on Saturday mornings, underselling the pro shop markedly. My most expensive balls—unblemished Top-Flites and Titleists—I sold for thirty-five cents. Others I took what I could get for, learning the fine art of haggling with the drivers of shiny new cars who would pull off to the side and inspect my carefully arranged assortment, often grumbling over the quality of my eight-for-a-dollar specials and intimating that they might report my activities to the club management if I didn’t throw in this or that sliced one as a gesture of goodwill, in as much as the buyer recognized it as his own to begin with, lost the previous week. I always gave in, often pretending that I was being cruelly taken advantage of, confident that come Monday evening the grinning Ben Hogan number 7 would be mine once more, and once again for sale.