The Risk Pool (56 page)

He nodded. “Guess who came home yesterday.”

“Drew Littler,” I said. The name was out before I could call it back or figure out where it came from.

“That’s a hell of a guess,” he said. “You run into him?”

I said I hadn’t and hoped I wouldn’t.

“Got his mother all in a tizzy already. Couldn’t call ahead, naturally, and say he was coming. Got to show up and give her a heart attack.”

“How is he?” I said, trusting my father to intuit that I was not inquiring after Drew Littler’s health so much as his mood.

“You should see him,” my father said. “He’s big as a house. Bigger. Moved his shit right back into the spare bedroom. Never mind waiting to be invited. Not Zero.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t call him that,” I suggested.

My father lip-farted. “That’s what he is.”

“That’s why you shouldn’t,” I said. “He probably resents the hell out of it, and he’s not sixteen anymore.”

“Big isn’t everything,” my father said, catching my drift. “Smart counts too, you know.”

“Where do
you
fit in?” Harry wanted to know.

“I’m smart,” my father said, grinning at him. “Smart enough to outwit that big ox, anyhow.”

Then he launched into the story of how he’d got Drew a job shoveling snow and he’d tossed an icy block of it through a second-story
window and then claimed it was an accident. This story led to another.

I’d heard them all, so I didn’t listen. I knew what he was doing, of course. He was getting himself all pumped up for what he considered to be an inevitable confrontation. He may even have started up with Eileen again to make sure there’d be no avoiding it. So I let him rant. There was no point in trying to slow him when he got rolling down this particular memory lane. I just grunted now and then to show I was still there, and thought instead about Tria, up on one elbow, her slender fingers trying to make sense of my own ragged curls. The idea of waking up next to her for the rest of my life was tempting. I couldn’t think of many drawbacks, if I didn’t count the fact that, despite our successful lovemaking, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tria Ward’s feelings for me did not run very deep. Her last remark—that things out there were always normal, no matter how abnormal—had stayed with me though. She’d delivered the observation like a punch line, but there’d been an edge to it, and I wondered if it was a warning I’d be foolish to ignore.

I put it out of my mind anyway. When Wussy came in, I was glad to shake free of my reverie. He looked kind of in between. I couldn’t tell whether he was finishing up Friday night or starting Saturday. He slid onto the stool next to me, as he frequently did when the three of us were out together, a safe distance from the rockhead. “Guess who I just saw,” he said.

My father got it right, the first guess.

Wussy ordered breakfast, and we kept him company. Harry still didn’t have any other customers. I liked the diner early in the morning before it got crowded. In fact, I considered it almost worth getting up for. In another half hour, you wouldn’t be able to talk in a normal voice and be heard over the din of rattling dishes, but at this hour you could use your library voice and be heard. Neither my father nor Wussy possessed a library voice, but if they had, they could have used them.

“You’re looking pretty pleased with yourself this morning, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy observed.

I shrugged. Three guys came in from the poker game upstairs and joined us at the counter.

“He’s just getting back with the car, I know that,” my father
said. “I asked him where he parked it all night, but he’s not saying.”

“Somebody smell his pussy finger,” one of the newcomers suggested.

“You think you’d remember what it smelled like?” asked another.

“Better than you,” said the first. “At least my finger isn’t up my ass always.”

“Nope,” Harry said. “Not always.”

I stood to leave, showing them all the finger in question.

“Where you going?” my father said. “Stick around. We’ll go out to lunch later.”

“I’ll see you tonight,” I promised. I knew what he had in mind, which was to sit around and get himself worked up, then go over to Eileen’s, ostensibly to invite her out to lunch. If I was with him, it would be worse than if he went by himself. Wussy was on to him too, I was pretty sure, and when the time came he’d find something else to do. If my father was alone, Eileen would probably be able to head off trouble, but not if he had an audience.

It was a nice morning now, and I was deliciously tired. My mother’s flat was a fifteen-minute walk and I was nearly there when a horn tooted and F. William Peterson pulled over. “Seen your old man?” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“Got some good news for him.”

Since that was the case, I told him.

“I tried to find him last night, actually,” Peterson said.

“Strangely enough, he might have been home,” I said. My father had been clean-shaven and rested-looking at the diner, curious for a Saturday morning.

“I never thought to check there,” the lawyer admitted. “Anyway, we got our break. One of the kids came forward and admitted they’d all been drinking and drag racing. We knew from the tire marks that there’d been a third car, but now it’s sewed up. All of a sudden everybody wants to settle. Looks like Sam may walk on this one.”

“How’s the girl?”

“Still in a wheelchair. That’s the bad part. Still, to be fair, I don’t think that’s your father’s fault. Not entirely, anyway.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

When he asked me if I wanted to go along and help spread the good news, I said no, I was tired.

“Mom worried about me?”

He shook his head. “Not too bad. She can’t make up her mind whether you were out all night or whether you got up early. It wouldn’t hurt to spend some time with her today. You’re always gone. Talk to her a little.”

“I’ll try.”

“She loves you,” he said, then added sadly, “More than anybody.”

“I know,” I admitted, suddenly feeling the terrible weight of her love, threatening to rip through the thin fabric of lies and deception that it rested on. “I wish to God she didn’t.”

“No use,” F. William Peterson said. “She can’t help herself.”

The telephone half woke me. My mother’s lowering her voice did the rest. With the shades drawn, it could have been night, but my watch said four-thirty and there was a ball game on TV in the living room. “Well, honestly,” I heard my mother say into the telephone, “that’s hardly my son’s fault.”

Groggy, I sat up in bed, vaguely aware that I had been dreaming unpleasantly and that the dream’s interruption was likely to be even more unpleasant. I had fallen asleep thinking about the night before and Tria’s perfume, but sleep had turned it all bad. Now, groggy and in between worlds, I was convinced that it was Mrs. Ward on the phone, calling to report that I had violated the sanctity of her home and hospitality, gotten her daughter pregnant. I had nearly convinced myself that this was the only plausible scenario when my mother hung up the phone. “Honestly!” she said again.

I listened to her pace, clearly trying to make up her mind
whether to wake me. We’d spent most of the morning together and I’d tried to take F. William Peterson’s advice about talking to her. Nothing came out but words though, and most of them were hers. After a while I just listened, nodding and muttering an occasional yes, until finally she took my hand and said wasn’t it amazing. All those years apart and we could still see into each other’s hearts. She could read me like an open book, she said. Like it or not, we were
simpatico
. She held up two intertwined fingers to show me what simpatico meant. I said I thought I’d take a nap. She said she knew I was exhausted. She could tell. We were simpatico.

There was a knock and my mother poked her head in. I was still sitting on the bed, still groggy. “Who was on the phone?” I said.

“Eileen somebody. A friend of your father’s. Apparently she thought that a recommendation.”

“Silly her.”

“What gets into people?” my mother said. I could see she really wanted to know. She’d upset herself trying to figure it out. “It’s as if it’s our responsibility to …” she let the thought trail off. “Your father has apparently had one too many. You are requested to go get him.”

“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet.

“I’d let them call a cab,” she said. “Why encourage such behavior?”

“I’ll go get him.”

“Sure,” she said, her upper lip curling with sarcasm. “And when you’re gone, guess who’ll be here to answer the calls? Guess who all the Eileens in Mohawk will call to report your father’s activities?”

“If you don’t want to answer it, don’t answer it.”

“This is
my
home.”

Her hands were shaking now. “Take it easy,” I said. “This is not such a big deal.”

“My health may not be a big deal to your father, but it is to me. I’ve fought too hard for it to let him destroy it. Too hard. Too too hard. I’ll not have my home invaded.”

I made a dramatic gesture of looking around the room, even under the bed. “Is he here? Who has invaded your home? Me?”

“How do you think it makes me feel to see you at his beck and call? As if he ever cared about you. Don’t you think I know why you came back to Mohawk? Do you imagine I’m a complete fool?
Do you imagine I think you came back out of any concern for
me
or
my
welfare?”

She was still frozen in the doorway, and there was nothing to do but wait for her to move so I could pass. I’d seen her swiftly unravel like this before, sudden, unexpected lucidity pushing her toward the brink, before she could pull herself back again. It was always awful to watch, and the worst part was that I never felt the slightest softening toward her. I knew from experience—mine and F. William Peterson’s—that people who surrendered territory to my mother seldom won it back. I’d often wondered whether my stubbornness in refusing her demands was inherited from Sam Hall or an instinctive male response to emotional black-mail. Either way, I knew I could count on an almost unlimited reserve of stony resistance. I also suspected that this current confrontation had been brought on by the morning’s congeniality, an action that demanded an equal and opposite reaction. Thirty days out of every month she reassured herself that things were fine. On the thirty-first, she needed to consider an equally distorted negative reality, plunge herself into despair and fury, to the outermost inconsequential limits of her own continuing dream.

She stood before me now, a full head shorter than I, an angry, self-pitying child full of terrible adult knowledge. “Why do you do it?” she said. “Why must you play Sam Hall’s fool?”

“I guess he and I are just simpatico,” I said, holding up two fingers, wondering at my own cruelty, its ability to surface so quickly, so powerfully, so intelligently focused on the existing scar, already red and inflamed.

Knowing right where to plant the dagger is a special gift.

Since Eileen was the one who had called, I figured my father was probably at Mike’s Place, but I was wrong. Mike hadn’t seen him. Somebody else said they’d seen him down at Greenie’s with half a load on. At Greenie’s, the bartender said he’d been there, tried to pick a fight and then left, thank Christ. That had been half an hour earlier. I thought about calling my mother to see if she knew where Eileen had been calling from, but even if she had, the trail was certain to be cold by now. Instead, I called Tria to see if she’d changed her mind about letting me take her to dinner. If so, it’d have to be a late one. Her voice sounded a million miles away.

“Is anything wrong?” I said.

“With me or you?”

“With us.”

“We have something of a situation out here, actually,” she said.

“That makes two of us,” I said, instinctively not liking the sound of her “situation,” glad for one of my own. I also had the odd feeling that someone was in the room with her, maybe even listening in on the conversation. “How about we exchange stories later?”

“Maybe,” she said.

I tried a couple more likely spots without any luck, but I found his car right where I’d left it that morning, which meant that either he was in town or he’d recruited Wussy to drive him. I didn’t mind not finding him right away, but I hoped Eileen hadn’t got frustrated waiting for me and called my mother again. After forty-five minutes or so I circled back and stopped into Mike’s again on the off chance, and there he was at the far end of the bar, big as life. Eileen wasn’t around, which meant that calling me was her last official act of intervention.

Mike came over when he saw me. “He just come in,” he said, guiltily, as if I suspected he’d hid my father in the back room the first time I was there. Sam Hall had all the moves of a small-town alcoholic whose wife knows all of his haunts but, due to the complicity of bartenders, still can’t find him.

“Son!” my father thundered when he spied me. In front of him he had an empty shot glass and a half-gone beer chaser. He himself was completely gone.

I slid onto an empty stool next to him. A guy I didn’t know and who looked even drunker than my father leaned forward to see if he could bring me into meaningful focus.

“Say hello to Roy,” my father said, leaning back on his stool so Roy and I could shake, nearly losing his balance in the process. “Roy’s a no-good drunk,” he explained. “Like me.”

“Bullshit,” Roy said. “Your old man’s the best.”

“Right,” I said, and Roy gave my father a hug.

“You know how come?” Roy wanted to know, and he waited politely for me to ask how come.

“How come?” I said.

“He’ll buy a goddamn drink, that’s how come. He ain’t tight. You come in … Sam Hall’s at the bar … you don’t even have to put your hand in your pocket. There’s already a drink in front
of you. What’s this, you say. Sam Hall, the bartender says. Am I right, Mike?”

Roy and my father looked around for Mike, who had been right there, and recently too, though he wasn’t there now.

“You want to know who’s really the best?” my father said.

“You tell me,” Roy said. “And I’ll believe you too. You know how come? ’Cause Sam Hall always tells the fuckin’ truth, that’s how fuckin’ come.”