The Risk Pool (46 page)

“I’ll call in the morning,” I said.

“It is the morning. Before you know it, it’ll be this time
tomorrow
morning.”

In fact, the night had just that deliciously out-of-control feel to it, enhanced by the fact that I had no idea where we were headed, though my father and Wussy claimed to. The proceedings had begun innocently enough. I’d told my father that I meant to have just the one beer with him, that I was exhausted and smelly from the long trip, that I needed to flop. He was already pretty bleary-eyed and it was my intention to drag him home with me, wherever the hell home might be. Wussy said he was going home himself, after just the one, but then somebody they knew came in and said who’s this, and my father had told him, and then the somebody bought a round to celebrate. This happened several times. Before I knew it, I had three sweating bottles of beer lined up in front of me. They hit me like a shot of adrenalin from a cardiac needle and the next thing I knew I was shooting pool and quarters were lined up in challenge from hell to breakfast. I hadn’t played in a long time, but my first two opponents were my father and Wussy, and by the time they’d beaten themselves I was beginning to get my stroke back. Wussy said so long, he was going home, and so, after traveling nearly three thousand miles, ostensibly to rescue my father from alcoholism, I discovered myself partners with him, the two of us winning beers faster than we could drink them, my father seldom even getting the opportunity to shoot. It took us two hours to leave.

“Let’s stop in here and say hello to somebody you know,” my father said when I wheeled his big convertible onto North Main. I had expected him to argue when I asked if I could drive, but he didn’t. The place he wanted me to stop at was another gin mill that had been something else before I left Mohawk. It was called Mike’s Place now. The first person we saw when we came in was Wussy, who bought a round in the time it took to walk from the front door to the near end of the bar.

“What can I say,” he said before my father or I had a chance to comment. “Anymore, this is home.”

The bartender turned out to be my old friend Mike, from The Elms, which he’d lost two years earlier in Vegas. He seemed in pretty good spirits, considering. The first thing he did was slap a quarter in front of me and tell me to play the jukebox.

“Fucking Duane Eddy,” he winked at my father. “The kid must
have played a hundred dollars worth of Duane Eddy, in quarters.”

“Who’s Duane Eddy?” my father said. I don’t think he ever heard music, no matter what kind it was or how loud you played it.

“So,” my father said when Wussy was in the John and Mike had gone off to pour drinks. “What’s up?”

“What do you mean?” I said, though I knew what he meant, all right. He meant I hadn’t been in Mohawk in seven years and now here I was, and he was curious about the timing. Not so curious that the question couldn’t wait three hours to get asked, but curious.

“A little bird’s been whispering in your ear, I imagine,” he said.

“Not really,” I replied lamely.

“Nobody’s mentioned my little problems, right?” he said, looking at me the way he used to when we played Liars, or when he wanted to know what the hell was wrong with me.

“I just got here,” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody yet.”

He nodded. “They don’t have telephones out there in New Mexico, right?”

“Arizona,” I said.

“No telephones in Arizona, right?”

“Right,” I said. “If there were, you’d have called me sometime, right?”

“Or you’d have called me, since you knew where
I
lived.”

“Or you’d have called my mother to find out my number,” I said. Then it occurred to me that something he’d said wasn’t true. “Besides, how was I supposed to know you were back in Mohawk.”

He answered the part he was comfortable about. “I don’t talk to your mother. You know that.”

“Bullshit,” said Wussy, fresh from the men’s room and trailing the unmistakable scent of urinal cakes. “We saw her last year when we went over there to get the pool table. Take it back to New Mexico with you when you go. I’ve busted my balls on it for the last time.”

“Arizona.”

“I don’t care where,” Wussy said. “Just take it. Every time the rockhead gets evicted, I get to have my back fucked up all over again. Wouldn’t be so bad if he’d get a first-floor apartment every now and then.”

My father nudged me. “Everybody should work once in a while, don’t you think? Just for a change of pace?”

“I’m just glad there aren’t no ten-story buildings in Mohawk,” Wussy said.

“They got the high rise going up,” Mike said, having drifted back from the other end of the bar.

Wussy shook his head. “The good news is you gotta be sixty-five to get in there. Sam Hall won’t live to
be
no sixty-five. There’s less of him every year.”

“I’ll piss on
your
grave,” my father said. “After that, I don’t care.”

“You show the kid your finger?” Wussy wanted to know.

“What finger?” my father said. His left hand was on the bar, fingers surrounding the tapered stem of his beer glass. His right hand was tucked under his left armpit as he hunched forward, elbows on the bar. It occurred to me that he’d been sitting that way pretty much all night.

“What finger?” I said.

“ ‘What finger’ is right,” Wussy said.

“You mean this one?” my father said, putting his right hand on the bar where I could see it. All that was left of his once blackened thumb was a stub, which stopped just short of where the knuckle would have been. I stared at it stupidly, unwilling to accept the testimony of my senses. Was it possible I had played pool with him for two hours and not noticed? It wasn’t his bridge hand, but still.

“Could have been worse. It wasn’t his pussy finger, anyhow,” Wussy said.

“Nope,” my father said, showing Wussy his middle finger.

“Put that away before you lose it too,” Wussy advised. “Pretty soon you’ll be left-handed.”

I was still looking at the mangled thumb. “Jesus,” I said, feeling suddenly woozy.

“No big thing,” my father said, flexing the other fingers on the right hand, the thumb stub bowing forward in awkward concert with the others. “Little accident last summer is all. Some dumb Polack forgot to hold on to a four-hundred-pound pipe.”

“Jesus,” I said again.

My father shrugged. “You don’t really think you could beat me at eight-ball if I had all my fingers, do you?”

“I’m going home,” Wussy said.

“So go,” my father said. “You’re always promising, but everyplace I go, you’re there.”

“Take care of him, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said, pocketing his change from the bar. “He’s a dangerous man.”

“Are you still here?” my father wanted to know.

“Not me,” Wussy blew him a kiss. “I’m history.”

When he was, in fact, gone, my father ordered us yet another beer. Our agreement to have just one was a couple six packs defunct, not even worthwhile as a pretense anymore. “So,” he said. “You figure on staying around for a while, or what?”

“I guess,” I said. “First thing is to find a job.”

“That’s easy,” my father said and called to Mike, who rejoined us. “I got your new day bartender,” he said.

Mike looked me over. “I could use one,” he admitted. “A good, clean-shaven, short-haired bartender is something I could use come Monday.”

“There you go,” my father said. “You know how to make a Manhattan?”

“Not really,” I said.

He shrugged. “You got till Wednesday to learn. Otherwise it’s just drawing beer from a tap and pouring shots. Stuff a hotshot college graduate should be able to figure out.”

He cuffed me then, pretty hard, too. Which made it official. I was home.

“You’re telling me I don’t know where the Big Bend is,” my father said in feigned disbelief.

Wussy paid him no attention. He handled my father’s convertible with the kind of ease that suggested that this was not the first time the driving had been relegated to him.

I was not only drunk, but lost. I’d been okay until Wussy turned off the lake road, then turned again. Two turns was all it had taken to disorient me completely.

“All I’m telling you,” Wussy said to my father, “is that if I stopped the car and let you out right here you couldn’t find your way back home in two days with a map.”

“Your ass,” my father insisted. “You missed your turn, I’m telling you.”

“Right,” Wussy said. “I missed my turn.” He kept right on the way he was going, though.

“How come you never go home when you say you’re going to?” my father wanted to know. It was puzzling, I had to admit. We’d
gone to two more bars after Mike’s Place, and at the second one, there was Wussy again at the end of the bar, big as life.

“It’s a good thing for you I don’t,” Wussy said. “Be just like you to take your kid up into the mountains his first night back and the two of you never heard from again.”

“Can you get something to eat in this place?” I said, suddenly ravenous in the cold night air. My eyes were streaming now. It felt cold enough to snow, April or no April.

Wussy looked over at my father. “If you aren’t too particular, I guess.”

My father was still convinced we were going the wrong way. “Lake George has all kinds of food,” he said. “That’s where we’re going to end up if we stay on
this
road. We’ll be there just about in time for a late breakfast.”

“What’s this up here?” Wussy said, slowing down, pointing to a building set back off the road in a clearing. At the dirt road turnoff, our headlights swept across a carved wooden sign nailed to a tree. “
BIG BEND HUNTING LODGE
” it said.

“Son of a bitch,” my father said, running his fingers through his hair, which was standing straight up from the wind.

“I never heard you,” Wussy said. “What’s this place? Lake George?”

My father shrugged. “What can I tell you? It’s not the way I go to get to the Big Bend, that’s all.”

“The fact that we got here proves that,” Wussy said, pulling into the large lot. There were only three or four other cars besides ours, and the place was dark except for a “Carling Black Label” in one window. “Welcome to the Happy Hunting Grounds, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy chuckled.

We all got out and felt our way in the dark toward the big porch, the lodge itself nothing but a vague outline against the dark trees, which moaned high up in the wind. On the steps it occurred to my father to ask me something. “You aren’t married are you,” he said.

I told him I wasn’t.

From inside we heard faint music, distant, as if it were coming from deep in the surrounding woods. It was louder when Wussy opened the door and yellow light spilled out onto the porch. A woman, naked from the waist up, was sitting cross-legged on a bar stool across the room, talking to the woman bartender, who was also topless.

“This is on me by the way,” my father said. “I missed your graduation.”

“You gonna wike up, Honey-bun, or just sleep through the best part?”

The young woman was roughly my age, a better-looking girl than you might expect to find in a hunting lodge, though not much better. She was right, too. I’d gone right to sleep while she was in the little closet bathroom doing I couldn’t imagine what. She was astraddle me now, though, having pulled my jeans down around my knees.

“I don’t mind jump-startin’ you, but I want you awike enough to know you got what you got.”

That sounded reasonable to me. I watched her work for a minute, then asked her what was most on my mind. “Where are you from?” I said.

“Marion.”

“All right. Where are you from, Marion.” It wasn’t a Mohawk accent.

“No, I mean I’m
from
Marion. Illinois. Where the penitentiary is. My boyfriend is in there, or was. They said they weren’t ever gonna let him out, but I was scared they might anyway. Which is how come I de-parted. He was trouble with a capital tee. How we doin’?”

“Fine,” I said, though we weren’t. She had large, fine breasts, but watching them roll was making me seasick.

“Good,” she said. “You know you feel just like a ace cube?”

“I’m warming up though,” I said.

“I can feel it,” she said, continuing her workmanlike assault on what ailed me. “I come up here, ’cause it’s a place he won’t think to look.”

“It’s true,” I said. “It would take a stroke of luck to find you here.”

It had taken a stroke of luck for me to find her, and I deeply regretted it. After a while she stopped. “I don’t thank you’re near as fond of me as you should be b’now.”

“Marion,” I said. “Forgive me.”

She must have, because I don’t remember any more struggles. When I woke up again, I was alone, gray light filtering in through the small window above the bed. It was incredibly still except for a hissing sound on the other side of the wall I’d been sleeping
against. My jeans were still down around my knees, so I pulled them up, buttoned the fly, all the while listening to the hissing. When I pulled back the curtain and glanced outside, I saw it was Wussy pissing in an isolated patch of snow. He looked up and saw me.

“First thing every morning,” he said, his voice flat and distant on the other side of the glass. “Can’t wait.”

I checked the little room that Marion had disappeared into and discovered that it was nothing but a tiny dressing room, not a bathroom. There was nothing to do but join Wussy, so I did. By the time I got out there, he was finished, but he kept me company.

“Snowing,” he said, and sure enough it was. When you looked up, you could see the flakes coming down through the trees, melting before they reached the ground. “Looks like you’re gonna have a good effect on him,” Wussy said. “Behaved himself last night for the first time in a hell of a while.”

I looked at him in disbelief. If last night constituted good behavior, I didn’t want to know about the bad.

“I wonder where he is,” I said, afraid he might be awake and listening on the other side of the wall.

We found him snoring on the sofa, his mouth wide open, the way he’d always slept when we lived together. He snorted awake when Wussy kicked his foot. “It’s about time,” he said, sitting up, consulting his watch. He studied Wussy first, then me. “Well?” he said.