The Risk Pool (44 page)

So, in my junior year in high school, I started collecting college catalogues, and finally stumbled on just what I was looking for—an anthropology major with a specialty in archaeology. The best affordable schools were all in the western United States, a perfect excuse to go far, far away. My mother put up little fuss when I made applications. Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California. The very places she’d spoken long distance to and dreamed of. She understood me. Perfectly.

I slept until 6:30 when the telephone woke me. I counted seventeen rings before it stopped. It was dusk outside and the Sunday street was quiet. The Ford Galaxie I’d bought to come west with over six years ago sat at the curb. I’d have to sell it in the morning, unless I could get F. William Peterson to float me a loan when my mother called back, as she surely would. He’d send the money, no questions asked, which was why I knew I wouldn’t ask him.

There was nothing in the refrigerator but an old jar of sweet pickles I couldn’t remember buying. I ate the three or four that remained, dumped the empty jar. In the morning, after I’d sold the car, I’d see about a part-time job, one that didn’t require a car, formally withdraw from the classes I’d stopped attending anyway, rethink, start over. That left just tonight. I thought about the loan Robert Crane had offered and regretted not taking him up on it. I should have agreed to meet him and Anita at the track. I could have told him I was sorry for getting steamed at him for explaining my losing streak and let them buy me dinner to show there were no hard feelings. The pickles had made me hungry.

It was such a pleasant scenario I hated myself for nixing the idea earlier. I consulted my watch and realized that they’d probably already left for the track. They both liked to arrive early, have a
beer, pore over the program one last time. Lacking the price of admission to the clubhouse, there was no way I could drop in on them, and there was nothing to do but sit in my own dingy living room and listen to the telephone ring.

As I sat there on the sofa feeling sorry for myself, I realized I was staring at money. My makeshift coffee table was a tree stump from the front yard, the top of which I had leveled and shaved. A girl I’d dated briefly had hammered quarters, dimes, and nickles into the soft wood surface and laminated them there, creating an illusion so real that the few visitors I had were always trying to pick them up or brush them aside so they could set their beer cans down. I don’t know how long I’d stared at them now before realizing that I wasn’t broke, not as long as I had a good claw hammer.

An hour later I was on the road, four dollars and eighty cents in my pocket, only vaguely concerned that I had crossed an invisible line that prevented other men from mutilating tree stumps. I parked on a dark side street in South Tucson, several blocks from the fluorescent green dome of the dog track so I wouldn’t have to pay for parking. It cost extra to get into the clubhouse, but that’s where Robert and Anita would be, so I paid. I had enough left over for a beer by way of dinner.

I drank it, leaning against the small bar where the dark men who would spring for the clubhouse, but not the extra three bucks for table seating, always congregated. I tipped the bartender my last quarter, which he rubbed, then sniffed, just as he had the slick coins I’d used to pay for my draft.

The beer was cold and it immediately made me light-headed. In the last forty-eight hours I’d eaten nothing more substantial than Ben Slater’s pretzels. It was already the third race and too late to get a bet down even if I’d had the money, so I glanced through my program quickly, deciding that the first race I really wanted to bet on was the fifth, where a dog called Blue Piniella looked like he couldn’t lose. The funny part was that two of the three handicappers had him out of the money, which meant the mutt might even pay a fair price. The third handicapper, Jester, had him first, right where he should be, but Jester was acknowledged to be a flake, and this too could help.

As the third race was being run, I watched the people at the tables along the mezzanine. The same faces every night, most of them. The old hands stayed seated and watched the race on the
ceiling and wall-mounted monitors. Newcomers got up and went over to the brass railing which separated the section they were in from the one immediately below. For some reason, they wanted to see the real race under the lurid yellow lights. Only after the dogs flashed by the finish line did they return to their tables.

When I spotted Robert and Anita Crane on the other side of the clubhouse, I went over and said hello. I liked talking to Anita, and I hoped Robert would intuit my situation and beg me to take the money he’d offered earlier. “Fuck me,” he said when I walked up, tearing several tickets in half and tossing them over his big shoulder. Not a good sign.

Anita’s attention was divided between Robert, the big tote board on the track’s center island, and the legal pad attached to her clipboard. A Marlboro dangled from her pale lips. “I really hate it when he does that,” she said, referring to Robert’s torn tickets. “
Un
official it says up there big as life, and he’s got the tickets torn up already.”

“He’s a jerk,” I agreed, though I shared Robert’s habit.

“Only four f’ing dogs would have to be disqualified for those tickets to be winners,” Robert Crane said. “F’ing” was his one concession to Anita’s tenderness and breeding.

“What do you know about Hawthorne?” Anita said to me.

“The Unpardonable Sin,” I said. “You can screw up all your life and still get saved, provided you don’t think you’re better or worse than everybody else. English 102.”

“Too clear,” she said. “How about this: ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne thought the unpardonable sin was one you couldn’t forgive. The important thing was don’t put people down, like in Goodman Brown.’ ”

“There you go,” I said.

“That’s the Hawthorne I knew and loved,” Robert agreed, then to me, “She speaks the language, doesn’t she?”

“She does indeed.”

“Bad night, amigo,” Robert said. “These particular dogs don’t seem to know who’s supposed to win.”

“Blue Piniella,” I said.

“Keep your voice down, for God’s sake,” Anita said.

We watched the handlers parade the dogs to the post for the fourth race, and I took Robert’s chair when he went to get a bet down.

“I hear you’re in the middle of a pretty amazing tailspin,” Anita said, not looking up from her legal pad.

“These things happen,” I said, trying to affect world-weariness.

“How bad is it?”

I ran my fingers through my hair. “Something’s gotta give pretty soon, let’s put it that way.”

I’d no sooner spoken the words than I felt a chill. It took me a minute to place them, to realize that I had summoned them from across a gulf of over a decade. It was that long since I’d seen my father. According to my mother he’d moved back to Mohawk, but she hadn’t seen him and didn’t know if it was true.

“Robert says you’re trying to lose,” Anita said over the top of her reading glasses, and for some reason it pissed me off that she should say so. She herself looked like a cave dweller, her skin sallow, almost transparent, like a dusty moth’s wing. “He says you’re a classic case. He’s going to do a paper on you.” She raised her eyebrow significantly.

Her husband came back then, so I surrendered his chair. “Who you got here?” he said.

I told him I was letting this one alone.

“Let them all alone and then you might have something, right?” he said.

Anita made a face at him. “
Do
tell. What would
you
have?”

“I have you,” Robert said, and I realized I had in fact stumbled into the middle of a marital spat. The subtlety of these things always surprised me. My father and mother had fought openly, their disagreements spilling out into the street or backyard. When married couples concealed their animosities in public, or tried to, it always threw me for a loop, and when the fourth race went off I was glad. I didn’t want to hear their next coded, civilized exchange.

I also didn’t want to be the subject of Robert Crane’s thesis, so I strolled back to the little bar to mingle with the other desperate men who were waiting for some fucking thing to give. On my way I passed a table occupied by an affluent young couple who had gotten up and gone over to the rail to watch the race below under the yellow lights. It was probably their first time at the track and they’d left a twenty-dollar bill on the table. In all the commotion it would have been the easiest thing in a difficult world to lift it, put it down again on Blue Piniella’s sleak nose in the fifth, and slip the twenty back later in the evening after the dog won and paid
off. The next easiest would be to wait for Robert Crane to get up from the table to place his bets and put the touch on him. I’d pay him back tomorrow after I sold the Galaxie if Blue Piniella found a way to lose.

But I didn’t do any of those things. Despite having slept all afternoon I was suddenly exhausted. Too tired to steal, to borrow, to cheer a long shot, to care much whether some fucking thing gave or whether it didn’t. So I just stood there and watched the small monitor above the bar as Blue Piniella broke from the gate a head in front of the pack and ran like the wind, wire to wire. He was beautiful, and I thought about his pure need to run, all the way back to my car.

When I got home, sure enough, the telephone was ringing. It was just like my mother to call and call, to stay up all night calling if need be. I decided to tell her I’d been home the whole time and working too intently to bother answering. Make her feel guilty about interrupting. “Yes, what is it, for heaven’s sake?” I said into the receiver.

“Ned?” the voice was female, distant and unrecognizable on the fuzzy long distance line. A Mohawk voice, but not my mother’s. “Ned Hall?”

“Who is this?” I said.

“This
is
Ned, isn’t it?” A pause. “I wouldn’t have called except it’s important,” Eileen Littler assured me. “It’s about Sam … your father.”

I tried my best, all the way across country, but it was hard to imagine my father a drunk. But then it was hard to imagine my father.

Ten years was a long time. I hadn’t seen him since the late spring afternoon he and Wussy had delivered the pool table. I’d been fourteen then, and I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize him. My first night on the bus—we must have been somewhere in New Mexico—I dreamed that when I arrived in Mohawk, a toothless, feeble old man with a cloud of gray hair was there to meet me at the Four Corners. When I stepped off the bus, he croaked, “Ned? Ned my boy?” and I pushed him away angrily, my own father. The dream had been so spooky it got me trying to calculate how old he was, so I wouldn’t be surprised. I figured he had to be between forty-five and fifty. That was as close as I could get.

Eileen hadn’t gone into detail. She said she’d called because she was wondering whether I had any plans to visit my mother once school was out (How had she known that I was
in
school and where?), because if I was, I should look my father up, because his life wasn’t so hot right now and because maybe a visit from his college graduate son would buck him up. “You don’t have long hair, do you?” she added.

“Not very,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Long hair’s one of the things that’s got him bent out of whack, or so I’m told.”

They themselves were on the outs, at least from what I could gather. I was to forget this call, in fact. There wasn’t much she could do with him anymore, not that she ever had been able to do that much. Hadn’t my mother written about him?

I said no, not a word, which struck her as odd and me as normal. According to Eileen, he’d been arrested no fewer than five times in the last two years, his drunken exploits fully chronicled in the
Mohawk Republican
, a newspaper that she seemed surprised to discover was not routinely for sale at newsstands in Tucson, Arizona. Was I sure I hadn’t heard a thing?

For some reason, again according to Eileen, in the most advanced stages of his drunkenness he would recall that he had a son who was a college graduate and then he’d start talking about me to anybody who’d listen. People were getting tired of it. I said I could understand that.

We left it that I’d think about paying a visit in a couple of months, but by the time I hung up I’d decided to leave for Mohawk in the morning. There was nothing keeping me in Tucson, I realized. Certainly not the doctoral degree I’d begun to lose interest in the moment the draft lottery had freed me to pursue
it. My landlord would be pissed if I bolted midterm, but he’d keep my deposit and sell my few sticks of furniture to make himself feel better. And he’d long coveted my tree stump. So, I threw my clothes into my grandfather’s old navy duffel bag, and in the morning I drove the Galaxie down to a used car lot across from the Greyhound terminal. I told a man wearing a sport coat that was shinier than any of the cars on his tiny lot that I could let him have the Ford for three hundred dollars. We settled on eighty-five, with which I purchased a See America special fare ticket. There was almost twenty dollars left over, which meant that I’d be able to eat during the three-day trip, at least occasionally.

In Albany, I had to change buses for the short trip further upstate to Mohawk. I had a few fellow passengers to begin with, but the last of them got off in Amsterdam, leaving the big bus to its driver and me. I stayed where I was, halfway down the aisle, and watched the cold spring rain through the dirty window. The countryside was already lush and everywhere green, except where tilting rusted billboards interrupted the landscape, last season’s advertisements for bankrupt businesses peeling down in strips. The constant sunshine of the Southwest, so full of false optimism, had often depressed me, and it occurred to me, as I sat there in the straining bus as it lumbered up Fonda Hill toward Mohawk, that I had solved the problem of excess optimism, anyway. It was the kind of gray late afternoon that promised dusk within minutes, but wouldn’t make good for three hours. That was fine with me. I was in no hurry.

When the bus pulled up in front of the cigar store on the Four Corners and I was handed my duffel bag, I realized I didn’t know what to do next. Main Street was virtually deserted after business hours, and sad-looking too, the emptiness of it, compared to the downtown of my childhood. From the Four Corners I could see that several more buildings had come down, including the movie theater and the old City Hall where my father had on numerous occasions spent the night. With so many gray buildings gone, the town resembled a Hollywood back lot. In the gaps between buildings you could see things that weren’t supposed to be visible from the street—dirty side entrances to shops that kept up halfway decent appearances out front, full garbage dumpsters awaiting trash collection, a car or two on blocks—things that would have
been secrets had the buildings along Main formed an unbroken line. No doubt the back alleys of every town were more or less the same, but it seemed a shame the town should be so transparent. Like people, communities deserved a facade, however flimsy. The old
SHOP DOWNTOWN MOHAWK
, Where There’s Always Plenty of Parking sign had faded into the bricks of the wall it had been painted on, and people must have seen the irony and just let it go. Since I didn’t know where my father was living, it made sense to go see my mother, who would surely take it as a betrayal if she discovered I’d gone someplace else first. Trouble was, I didn’t feel up to confronting her quite yet and besides, just walking in on her without warning with my longish hair and four-day beard might knock her for a hell of a loop.