The Risk Pool (40 page)

“You know how it goes,” my father said.

“That’s right.”

“There were four of them, you know.”

“And they were where they weren’t supposed to be to begin with, right?”

My father raised his eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say,
You tell me
.

Tree was there too and he came over and joined us. He’d been standing next to a woman so big that at first I’d thought it was Alice from The Lookout, but when she turned around I saw it wasn’t. “Nice crowd,” Tree said, then to Wussy, “Y-y-you a friend of Jack’s?”

Wussy didn’t say anything. After a minute he drifted away.

“Nice going,” my father said.

“W-what,” Tree said.

“Nice going, that’s all.”

“W-what’s he doing here?”

“What’re
you
doing here?”

“Don’t get t-t-touchy, Sammy.”

“R-r-right,” my father said.

Eileen came by and Tree took an assortment of hors d’oeuvres, balancing them halfway up his arm. My father and I watched the expression on his face as he chewed the first one.

“Now what’re you going to do with the others?” my father said.

Tree looked around desperately for a place.

My father took a couple, popped one in his mouth. “You never had pâté, you rube?”

“I should’ve known. If it looks like sh … it and smells like sh … it, it must be—”

“Right,” my father said, munching the other.

“I’ll just give this last one to M-marge,” Tree said, obviously pleased to have remembered her.

“She looks hungry,” my father admitted.

We watched him return to where the huge woman was standing all by herself, elbow to elbow with strangers, nobody to talk to. She looked pleased and relieved by Tree’s return, as if she’d half expected to be ignored the rest of the evening. She accepted the cracker and chewed on it daintily, not at all offended. Tree shrugged at us across the room.

I could not take my eyes off the big woman, who continued to eat the cracker as if she doubted it would be her lot in life ever again to eat anything so delicious.

After a while I slipped away. As usual, my father knew everybody. Eventually he would notice I was gone, but we had an understanding about that. I could be gone all I wanted, provided I was back by the time he was ready to go someplace else. And gauging when that might be ready wasn’t as tough as you might think. He had a rhythm to him. In bars I could tell, within a minute or two, when he’d get up to go to the men’s room, when he’d figure it was time to beat me in a game of shufflebowl. Now, I could tell just by looking at him that he’d be pretty content for a while.

Somebody had opened the door to the library, where Jack Ward had left me on my previous visit, and people had spilled in there to escape the crush. Only now that room was crowded too, if not quite as noisy as the big foyer. A large man knelt in front of the big console television, as if he were contemplating turning the set on so he could compare its picture with his own. Nearby, a frizzy-haired
woman removed a leatherbound volume from one of the tall oak bookcases, glanced around the room, and slipped it into her big bag. Then she noticed me, and when I didn’t look away, she checked again to make sure nobody was watching, and replaced the book. When the man kneeling in front of the TV straightened up, he and the frizzy-haired woman left the room together, though not before she located me again and narrowed her eyes at me murderously. Out of curiosity I went over to the bookcase to find out what she’d wanted so badly, because I’d never seen anybody steal a book before. This one was a fancy movie edition of
Gone with the Wind
, which explained it.

I wandered. There were other people I knew in the crowd. Rose, her orange hair in a shockingly tall beehive, looked right at me and away again. She’d never seen me all spit-shined before, so I couldn’t blame her for not recognizing me. Just inside the living room doorway, the old Monsignor sat in a high-backed throne-shaped chair, Mrs. Ambrosino, soberly resplendent in a billowy dress, in attendance at his side, rather pointedly refusing hors d’oeuvres on his behalf, well in advance of the old man’s actually seeing a single offering. I steered clear.

Then F. William Peterson materialized at my elbow and drew me aside like a conspirator, looking excited and flushed. “You’ll be home in the morning?” he wanted to know. I said probably, and that seemed to please him. He had just a thin tuft of baby-fine hair on top now, and it stood on end. “Great things,” he whispered. “You wait.”

After a while I joined the line filing slowly toward and past Jack Ward’s casket. He was dressed the way I remembered him, in a white suit with a pale pink sweater, slender and graceful even in death. I refused to think of him as a comic figure on the terrace of the Mohawk Country Club, his trousers down around his knees. I promised myself I would never laugh at the story when it was recounted at the diner, for it surely would be, for a long time to come. Maybe, I thought, even if I never amounted to anything, it would be enough not to be the sort of man who’d tell the story of Jack Ward’s final round for laughs.

There was no way to tell by looking at Hilda Ward whether she’d been spared the details of her husband’s death. Even smaller than I remembered, the tiny woman gave no hint of grief or loss, and I thought of what Mrs. Petrie had said in the kitchen about her being rid of him. I also remembered the way she’d treated him the afternoon Tria had backed his Lincoln into the
woods. Tria stood next to her mother now, her dark eyes full, and she was so lovely I felt a dull ache in my chest. Her face was the color of her father’s fine suit, and she could not take her eyes off him, even to receive condolences. Suddenly, I knew I could not face her, could not present myself to her. I left the line and the living room.

My father was still talking to some people in the foyer, so I went back into the library, which had emptied out. For some reason, the first thing I saw was the small gap on one of the shelves across the room. I ran my fingers along the spines of the books, stopping at the space where the fancy
Gone with the Wind
had been. The horrible woman had come back for it.

We dropped Eileen off and drove home.

“What’d our friend want?” my father said when we were alone.

“Who?”

He looked over at me. “Who. Your ass, who.”

Pretending ignorance never got me anywhere with him, somehow, though he never questioned legitimate dumbness.

“Nothing,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie, since he certainly hadn’t said anything specific. But it wasn’t exactly the truth either.

“Nothing,” my father repeated.

When we pulled up in front of the apartment, a pair of big legs were sticking out of the dark entryway and onto the sidewalk. They didn’t move, but when my father turned off the ignition an empty bottle landed on the canvas top of the convertible and broke in the middle of the street. “Speaking of nothing—” my father said.

When we got out, Drew Littler tried to stand, lost his balance and crashed backward through the fogged glass door and into the unlit hall at the foot of the staircase.

“Get back in the car,” my father said.

There was just enough light from the street to see Drew Littler trying again to struggle to his feet. I had half a mind to do what I was told for once, but I stayed where I was.

“Come on, Sammy,” Drew Littler said. “Let’s do it. You and me.”

“Do what, Zero?”

“Don’t call me that. I’ll have to kill anybody calls me that,” he
said seriously, as if the need to kill my father were to him a matter of infinite regret.

“All right,” my father said, stepping through the door frame and into the broken glass. “What should I call you?”

“Let’s fight,” Drew said, as if the proposal required my father’s permission.

“Nah,” my father said.

“Come
on
,” said Drew, disappointed. “Let’s fuckin’ fight. Kick my ass, Sammy. You’re supposed to be some kind of ass kicker. Kick my fuckin’ ass, Sammy.”

“I got a better idea,” my father said. “We go upstairs, get a good night’s sleep, and fight in the morning when we’re fresh.”

“No sleep,” Drew said. “Kick ass.”

He didn’t look like he’d be doing any ass kicking to me. I’d got close enough to see pretty well. He was leaning up against the banister, a jagged piece of opaque glass sticking out of the top of his blond head. He seem unaware of both the glass and the ribbon of black blood that snaked down his neck and into his shirt.

“Aw, Sammy,” he said, slumping onto the stairs. He was crying now. He ran his fingers through his hair where they encountered the shard of glass. Lowering his head between his knees, he shook his head like a wet dog until the fragment fell out. Then he began to moan. I missed what he said the first couple of times, then finally understood. “He’s dead, Sammy,” Drew Littler cried. “He’s dead.”

He was way too big, and we had to get Wussy to help us. My father went looking for him while I stayed with Drew in the hallway. He was bleeding quite a lot, but my father said head wounds always did, and not to worry. Remember whose head it is, he said.

Drew slept peacefully, slumped up against the wall. He smelled something awful, a mixture of sweet odors—whiskey and body odor and blood. And my guess was that he’d wet his pants too. I stayed with him as long as I could, then went outside to keep from throwing up. After a while my father returned with Skinny Donovan in tow.

“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” Skinny said when he saw. “You sure he’s alive?”

Drew groaned, as if in answer, then was still again.

“Wha’d you do, Sammy? Knock his ass through the door?”

“Didn’t have to,” my father said. “He fell through it.”

“You need somebody to swear to it?”

My father said he didn’t think so, though it was good of Skinny to offer.

“He sure did show those coons where the bear shit in the buck-wheat,” Skinny observed, as if he hated to see someone of demonstrated worth so cruelly reduced. “You want to drag him upstairs?”

“Let’s wait for Wuss,” my father said. “It’s three flights up and he weighs a ton. We’re liable to get halfway up and lose him.”

“You and me and the kid could manage,” Skinny said, insulted.

“Probably, but let’s wait.”

Skinny shrugged. “Let’s wait outside then. It’s like a toilet in here.”

In a few minutes Wussy pulled up and parked across the street. He’d changed back into his regular clothes, including his fishing hat. He shook his head at me. “More foolishness, eh Sam’s Kid?”

We went inside and stared at Drew.

“Which end do you want?” my father said, ignoring Skinny.

“I don’t want either end,” Wussy said, but he positioned himself at the sleeping boy’s feet. “This one’s not quite so ugly, though … anybody check to see if he’s alive?”

“He’s alive,” my father said, trying to get some kind of grip under Drew’s armpits.

“Be just like you to have me lug a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound retard up three flights of stairs and then find out he’s dead.”

Every time my father tried to lift, Drew’s arms went limp over his head. “You picked the right end, asshole,” my father said to Wussy, who had his hands locked under the boy’s knees. “I suppose you want me to back up the stairs, too.”

“Only if you want him up there,” Wussy said. “I’m all for leaving him right where he is.”

It took them fifteen minutes. Finally my father had to take one arm, Skinny the other, going shoulder to shoulder up the narrow stairs, cursing each other’s clumsiness every step. “Don’t fight, girls,” Wussy said, his hands still locked under Drew Littler’s tree-trunk legs. Somebody farted silently, gruesomely, and the three of them argued over who it was, finally settling on me, though I was both downstairs and downwind. Wussy complained about the fact that the boy smelled like bait, and Skinny said he
must have pissed not only in his pants but his shirt as well, because that was clammy and wet, too.

“Where?” Wussy said when they got him into the apartment.

“Bathtub,” my father gasped.

It took some maneuvering, but they finally got him in. Skinny sat down on the commode, deathly white and breathing hard. All three men were sweating.

“You could stand a shower your own self,” Wussy said, glaring at Skinny Donovan.

“It’s not me that stinks,” Skinny said defensively. “It’s him.”

Drew’s blond head was still slumped forward on his chest, and the spot where the glass fragment had stuck in his skull was now black and matted, though the bleeding had pretty much quit. Wussy put a finger on the boy’s throat. “Well, you’re right for once,” he said. “He’s alive. Anybody call his mother?”

“Run over to the diner,” my father said to me. “Take your time. Try not to scare her to death. Maybe we can get him cleaned up by the time she gets here.”

They didn’t though. I took my time, like he said, and I didn’t tell Eileen anything except that he was with us. She must have heard something in my voice though because she pulled up behind my father’s car about a minute later and got out of her little car just in time to hear a billiard ball come crashing through the window above and land on the hood of Wussy’s truck across the street. During the minute or so I had waited for her, the deserted street had filled with Drew Littler’s howls, and they were more animallike than human.

By the time Eileen and I got upstairs, my father and Wussy had succeeded in pinning Drew to the floor while Skinny Donovan, in a strictly unauthorized maneuver, kicked the boy in the head until he stopped trying to get up. Wussy had a big knot on his forehead, and my father’s little finger was bent back at an absurd angle. There were billiard balls everywhere.

Thanks to Skinny’s pointed-toed attacks, the wound in Drew Littler’s head had opened up again and the boy’s face was ghastly with blood. He lay there on the floor beneath the two men, panting and crying and howling like a dog. Then, finally, he passed out again. This time they didn’t put him in the tub. Turning on the shower was what had revived him. Instead, Skinny Donovan was
instructed to go across the street and call a doctor my father knew. I offered to go, but they wanted Skinny out. Eileen had immediately fallen to kicking him in the shins for kicking her son, and she was now glaring at him as if she might start up again without provocation. When the doctor came, he found a blue vein in Drew’s arm on the first try. The boy never even twitched.