The Risk Pool (35 page)

Skinny Donovan was there, two stools down, snoring peacefully, his head on the counter, cowlick astir.

Wussy and I ordered hamburg steaks. People looked at us, went back to private conversations, their heads a little closer together. I began to feel spooked. I didn’t mind eating dinner with Wussy, it wasn’t that. Maybe it was just that the usually noisy diner was so quiet. We could hear. Skinny’s bottom lip flapping when he exhaled.

“You might not see your old man till later in the week,” Wussy said when the food came, as if he hadn’t wanted to open a conversation until he had a pretext for abandoning it. “He said for you to go out and stay with Eileen for a few days if you want.”

“Do I have to?” I said, not wanting to ask the obvious question, not with the convertible sitting at the curb right across the street. I didn’t have anything against staying with Eileen, but I didn’t really want to. There had been other nights when my father hadn’t come home, or came home so late that it didn’t count as coming home, and I didn’t mind staying alone in the apartment. I was going on fourteen, after all.

Wussy shrugged as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I had to do something I didn’t want to. “You got money?”

I said I did.

“Take this anyhow,” he said, a folded twenty materializing from his flannel shirt pocket.

I said I was fine, really.

“Now you’re finer,” he said, stuffing the bill in my own shirt pocket. “Nothing could be finer. Than to be in Caroliner.”

If things weren’t strange enough, who should walk in right then but Eileen herself. She came right over and slipped onto the stool between me and Skinny Donovan, who gurgled but did not budge.

“So,” she said. “You want to stay with me for a couple days?”

“Why?” I said. “I’m all right.”

“Just till your father gets back?”

“Why?” I repeated.

“Why not?” Eileen said, trying to sound jovial.

I didn’t feel jovial. There were too many people who knew something I didn’t, and it was all too clear that they weren’t going to tell me. It wasn’t me, this time, either. Before, I had jumped to the wrong conclusion in the matter of my mother, but this was different. Then I had marveled at what great liars they all were, how well they’d concealed the truth. Now it turned out they were pretty pitiful at trying to pretend nothing was up.

“Do you have money?” Eileen wanted to know, bending down for her purse. If Wussy hadn’t been there, I’d have said no. I was suddenly angry enough to take a hundred and spend it. There was my father’s convertible sitting out there in the street, and here we all were talking about him as if he’d left town for the weekend. All I could think about was what must have happened. I saw the poker table, my father leaning forward to draw in the pot, somebody pushing a chair back and standing up, like in westerns. Or somebody else raking in the pot and my father standing up. Somebody pulling a gun.

Of course there were all sorts of places he could be. He could be in Las Vegas with Mike. They had gone before, gotten good and drunk and driven to the Albany airport. That made as much sense as anything, and it accounted for the car being out front. They would’ve taken Mike’s, and he wouldn’t have wanted me to know where he was going, either. I tried to picture him and Mike shooting craps in a big casino, but my imagination refused to
conjure the scene. Instead I kept seeing him in a hospital bed, tubes everywhere, beneath an oxygen tent.

Wussy paid for dinner and the three of us went outside, leaving Skinny where he was, with his head on the counter. The cold March wind tunneled up Main Street, and we hunched our shoulders against it. There was a light on in the living room of the Accounting Department. I remembered distinctly turning it off before we left. A shadow passed before the shaded window, then disappeared.

Neither Eileen nor Wussy appeared to notice. Eileen was still talking to me, trying to convince me to come stay with her. I didn’t want to appear too anxious to get away from them, so I played it cool and just shrugged and waited for Eileen to get tired of talking to a blockhead. I saw the shadow three more times before Eileen observed that I couldn’t be anybody’s kid but Sam Hall’s, and Wussy said, “So long, Sam’s Kid. You know how to find me,” which I did, more or less. Finally, I said I thought I’d just do some homework and go to bed, and they gave up and drove off.

About half a block up the street was a black Cadillac with big tail fins I’d never seen before, and I remembered the men who had come to Mohawk looking for my father years ago, and how he had hidden out until they left. I walked by the street entrance to our apartment and glanced in, then headed up the street, then back again, this time going in, quietly, so as not to rattle the glass. The shadow I’d seen in our apartment hadn’t looked like my father’s. It hadn’t moved right, but I couldn’t be sure. At the first landing I leaned over the rail and peered up into the darkness between the banisters. I didn’t see any movement and the stairs were quiet except for the creaking that registered my own weight.

I fingered the keys in my pocket, recalling that I had one to Rose’s. If I was quiet, I could slip in there, open the door a crack and wait to see who came out. Whoever it was couldn’t stay in there forever. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good plan.

I could tell her key by feel. The first thing Rose had done when she signed the lease was change all the locks, and her keys were different from the big, old-fashioned one that fit the door of the Accounting Department. On the other side of the frozen glass, whoever had let himself into our apartment was pacing, curiously unconcerned, it seemed to me, about the sound of his footfalls.
When I turned the key in Rose’s door and the lock thunked audibly, the shadow in our apartment stopped pacing, but made no move toward the door. After a minute, it resumed again.

I don’t know why I didn’t duck into the salon. Maybe, in the back of my mind I was wondering why whoever was in our apartment had the light on. Somebody wanting to surprise my father would have left it off. And maybe the more I watched the figure pace, the more I listened to its impatient heavy footfalls, the more certain I was that I recognized it. (Lord knows I should have.) Leaving the door to Rose’s ajar so that I could beat a retreat in there if I had to, I faced the door to our apartment and turned the brass knob.

Inside stood F. William Peterson.

Naturally, I blamed him. F. William Peterson was just the sort of person you took things out on if he happened to be handy. I remember understanding, when I saw him standing there in the middle of the room, why my father had beaten him up in the parking lot so many years ago. You’d kick him for the same reason you’d kick a faithful dog that didn’t know any better than to keep its cold, wet nose out of your crotch when you’d had the kind of day that diminishes a human being’s capacity for fundamental decency.

He had come to tell me what nobody else would, and I hated him even more blackly than the liars. Hated him for the way he sat me down as if I were a little boy and told me not to think badly of my father just because maybe he’d done something wrong, just because he was in jail. I hated him for making the news bearable, for reminding me that even good people sometimes did bad things. It didn’t mean they didn’t love us. That I shouldn’t worry too much anyway, because if F. William Peterson was right, and
he thought he was, things were going to start looking up for me very soon, and I didn’t want to waste my time being depressed when I should be preparing for the good times. I could tell that he would have liked to put his arm around my shoulder like I was
his
son, though he must have guessed that I would have none of that. When he was finally finished, when there wasn’t anything else he could think of to say and we were facing each other, I drove my hands deep into my pockets to prevent him from offering one of his.

“He’ll tell you about it,” F. William Peterson said. “He should be the one, not me. I don’t think they’ll be able to hold him more than forty-eight hours.”

The card he left me, with his office and home phone numbers on it, I tore to shreds as soon as the door closed behind him. It reached the snowy sidewalk below before he did. A block and a half up Main Street was City Hall, which contained the jail where my father was. From the front windows of the Accounting Department you could just see it if you turned out the lights and put your nose to the dark, cold glass. In fact, because of the angle and the thickness of the glass, it looked right next door, close enough to touch.

If F. William Peterson imagined that my father was going to have a rough time explaining to me about why he’d been thrown in jail, he still had a lot to learn about my father. Much to everybody’s surprise he was out the next day. I’d skipped school and spent the day here and there, imagining that strangers I passed on the street could tell by the look of me that my father was locked up. I came home about the same time I normally did and noticed that the Mercury wasn’t sitting at the same angle in the snowbank, which meant that it had been driven and returned. Which meant that my father was a free man again. I found him right across the street drinking coffee at Harry’s.

“Hello, Buster,” he said when he looked up and saw me there. “You gonna sit down or what?”

I took the stool next to his. Tree was on the other side of him, looking hangdog. If he noticed me come in, or noticed my father notice, he made no sign. “I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I just w-w-wisht I knew what to do.”

“Say hello to Tree,” my father said. As I’ve mentioned, Sam
Hall wasn’t much on introductions, but there were certain people he introduced me to all the time and could never be convinced, even when both parties protested, that we’d ever laid eyes on each other. I said hello to Tree because it was easier to go along and because Tree was just as likely to have forgotten me, in which case I’d be all alone in claiming prior acquaintance.

“I w-w-wisht I knew, Sammy. Honest to … Christ I do.”

“I wish you did too, you pain in the ass,” my father said. “I got a problem or two myself right this minute.”

Tree began to cry. “Jesus,” he said. “I know you do, Sammy. How do you think I feel asking. At a time like this, when you’re up sh … it crick yourself. I just w-w-wisht I knew what else to do.”

My father slipped him twenty.

“Jesus, Sammy,” he said, crying harder now. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You could go away and let me talk to my kid a minute.”

It was just the sort of suggestion that Tree was looking for, now that he had the money. You could tell. It was something he could do by way of repayment. “Y-you got it,” he choked. “Anything. Y-you got it.”

He got halfway to the door and remembered something and came back. “I just w-wisht I knew what to do,” he told my father. “If I knew w-what to do, I’d be all right.”

“I know, Tree,” my father said. “You and everybody.”

Finally, the door closed behind him.

“Wisht he knew what to do,” Harry grumbled from way down the counter. “Anybody with half a nut could tell him what to do. Go home to his wife and kids and bring his paycheck with him. Once in a fuckin’ while, anyhow.”

“Love,” my father said. “When he’s got the bug, he’s not himself.”

“Bullshit,” Harry said. “It’s the only time he
is
himself. Problem is, he’s got a shitty self.”

“And no taste, to boot,” my father said.

“Argh!” Harry concluded, spitting onto the surface of the hot grill, where the wet spot crackled, jumped, and disappeared. It was late afternoon and he’d be cleaning it in a few minutes anyway before the small dinner crowd came in wanting grilled rib steaks, on special today because they’d been in the cooler a while and were beginning to look as gray as the surface of the grill.

“So,” my father said. “I guess you heard about my little problem.”

He ran his hand over the stubble on his chin as if the little problem he was going to tell me about was the loss of his razor.

“It’ll get straightened out here pretty quick,” he predicted. Since we had the place to ourselves, he got Harry to change a ten so we could play Liars.

“How do you know?” I said.

“Got to,” he said. “ ’Cause if I get screwed, some other people get it even worse. In another day or two they’ll figure that out, if they haven’t already. Once they do”—he lip-farted—“the whole thing disappears. It never happened even. That’s all. Simple.”

“Simple,” I said.

“You don’t think so?”

“Sure,” I said.

He had me down to my last bill already and wondering if I’d ever learn to play the game. I wondered if I’d be any better playing with my own money instead of his. Maybe not. Maybe I’d be worse.

“Wussy come by?”

I said he had. “We had hamburg steaks.”

“He pay?”

I said he had.

“You could look all over hell and gone and never find a better one,” he said absently. My father didn’t object to the word “nigger,” but he wouldn’t use it on Wussy except when Wussy was there to hear it.

“Eileen came by too,” I said, and before I thought, “and Mr. Peterson.”

“And he told you where I was, right?”

I could have kicked myself. “He wanted to know if I needed anything, mostly. Eileen wanted me to stay with her,” I added, hoping that this new subject would take.

“Funny the way he turns up,” my father said, as if he considered it genuinely curious.

I won two quick rounds while he thought about it.

“I like him,” I said, though I hadn’t the night before.

“You do,” he said.

I shrugged.

“You know what?” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t.”

There was no point in asking him why, because if I did, he’d tell me and get himself all worked up in the process. Eventually he’d get around to his lawyer speech and it was a long one, absolutely to be avoided if possible.

“Let me tell you something about all these guys,” my father said.

“Four sixes,” I said, and settled in.

Blessedly, Eileen stopped in for a minute on the way to work, interrupting our Liars game and the lawyer speech. When she left, we ate some dinner and tried to get the Liars going again, though it was clear that neither of us felt much like it. Sitting there in Harry’s for so long gave me the idea that maybe we were waiting for somebody, though I couldn’t think who. Eventually, we left.