The Risk Pool (60 page)

A day later, I had not found the courage to go to her until it was too late, and now, as I headed toward my mother’s house along a sleepy street under a clear night sky, I was more than anything relieved. It was as if she herself had given me the antidote to loving her, allowed me the privileged glimpse of the beginnings of the transformation I’d long feared would someday take place. There in the dark, until she’d spoken, I’d not been able to tell her from her mother, and even when she did speak I’d heard a bitter inflection in the tone of her voice that was directly traceable to Hilda Ward. Tomorrow, a month from now, a year, I’d wake up and find my Tria—and Jack Ward’s Tria—gone, the transformation complete. It would take no longer than it took for the young Hilda Smythe of the library photographs to go from young woman to mummy. Perhaps Tria herself could see it coming. Perhaps that was what she’d been trying to warn me about when she said that things at the Ward house were always normal. She bore the legacy of a superficially charming and opportunistic father, of a mother shrunken and ruined for life and love by the father she idealized, a third-rate chronicler of arcane history and, apparently, a first-rate deceiver of worshipful children. And, to my shame, there was one other person I held against her. As she herself had remarked, it was too terrible not to be true.

My beloved was what she came from. After a few blessed years, sustained by some conjurer’s trick, I would not be able to tell mother and daughter apart in a well-lit room. And then what would I probably do? Probably what her father did, or what my father did, or some unimaginative synthesis of these two Mohawk paradigms. For if Tria was her mother, then what on earth was I? Wasn’t I the same shabby conjurer’s trick? Had Tria come looking for me earlier in the evening, gone from dim smoky bar to dim smoky bar, surveying from the entryways the shadowy
figures down the long bars, spying my father and me on adjacent stools, hunched over sweating beer bottles, wouldn’t she too have been granted a glimpse of the future? And as she came toward us through the smoke, would she not fear for a brief instant that she had my father and me confused, and known in that moment what the future held—herself alone in her mother’s house, except for the old woman, truly old and sick now, shrunken doll-size in her king-size bed, while I sported with Marion and Mohawk’s other sporting men at the Big Bend Hunting Lodge?

And somewhere in this awful mix, a monster, slouching among our separate existences. Made terrible because, unlike Tria and myself, he had no blueprint to follow, nothing clear in his mind to become. Nothing. Zero. But nothing grown huge, as big as a house, with one simple crazy philosophy—“What’s mine is mine”—and imagining he could wring it free, whatever was desired, by brute force, by will.

These were the alcoholic phantoms that pursued me along the narrow Mohawk avenues until finally, the third time I arrived in front of the house that contained my mother’s flat, I climbed the back stairs and found her sitting quietly puffy-eyed at the kitchen table, as patiently despairing and hopeful as she had been the afternoon my father had returned me, scratched and swollen and riddled with poison ivy, to her doorstep for repair. Her eyes now contained that same terrible sadness, submerged deep and quiet. And for a brief moment I felt I was her son again, the son of this strange woman who had tried her best to save me from probably.

The following Monday afternoon, Tree came in after his shift out at the campsite where during the summer he still sat in the same little shack and sold parking tickets to bathers. The arm he dangled out the window was berry-brown, the other fish-white, like
the rest of him. I drew him a beer and he nodded to Irma, Mike’s wife, when she emerged from the steamy kitchen and glowered at him for no particular reason. Tree was scared of women in general and very frightened of Irma. For as long as he could remember, he’d always had at least one big woman mad at him, and over the years he’d come to the conclusion that there must be something about his looks that did it to them, especially the big ones. Irma was a sizable woman, though not nearly as big as the two women he’d married. He gave her wide berth, just the same, as if he feared he might fall in love with Irma and marry her too. Her glowering at him all the time struck Tree as a dare. She glowered the same way at everybody, but her genuine ill humor had special meaning for Tree, who mistook it for foreplay. When he spoke, it was to a neutral spot on the wall that neither included nor excluded Irma. “Some r-r-ruckus over to The Bachelors last night.”

The Bachelors was a nightspot on the lake road that catered to phony ID’s. Anybody who couldn’t start a fight at the pool hall went out there.

“Assholes,” Irma said. It was her standard comment.

“I’m with y-you, Irma,” Tree said, still fixed on the same point on the wall. “You couldn’t p-pay me to go out there. You know what they get for a draw?”

Nobody knew.

“Ninety-five cents,” Tree said indignantly. “No b-bigger’n what you get right here. Hell, I’d stay home before I’d p-pay that for a g-goddamn draw.”

“You should go out to the Holiday Inn,” somebody said. “It’s a buck fifteen.”

“For a
shot
and beer, right?” Tree said.

“Shit no. Just the draw.”

“Shot and a b-beer’d be different,” Tree said.

“You should go to New York City,” somebody else offered.

“What the hell for?”

“What’s a shot’n’beer go for there?”

The guy who said we should go to New York hadn’t been there himself, but he’d heard about it and said you couldn’t get drunk on less than a week’s pay.

“What happened at The Bachelors?” I said, so Tree’s original observation would not be lost entirely.

“Hell of a ruckus is what,” said the guy who told us we should go to New York.

Tree looked at him blackly. He hadn’t brought up the business at The Bachelors to surrender the tale to an interloper. “B-bouncer b-busted up a couple kids around midnight. Tossed ’em out in the p-parking lot. They come back with some friends around closing and b-beat the bejesus out of him with two-b’fours. Left him in the dumpster.”

“Killed him?” the man wanted to know.

“Damn near,” Tree said.

“Their own fault for hiring nigger bouncers out there.”

“B-bullshit,” Tree said. “It was Dick Krause’s kid.”

“Benny?”

“How do I know?” Tree said. There were limits to what a man could know, and he had reached his with regard to what had happened out at The Bachelors.

“You’re thinking of Benny Raite,” somebody explained to the man who’d wanted to know if it was Benny.

“They hire big coon kids from Amsterdam to be bouncers out there,” said the man Tree had tried to silence.

Tree stared at him again. “This was Dick Krause’s kid, I’m telling you.”

“Benny,” somebody said. “Benny Krause.”

“Bullshit,” somebody else said. “I seen Benny Krause this morning.”

“Benny Raite’s a bouncer,” said a third. “I bet you’re thinking of him.”

They were still working on it when I got off at five-thirty. My father’s car was in front of the Mohawk Grill, so I stopped in. He didn’t look good. He was dirty from the road and his eyes were still red from the weekend. He was staring at two skinny grilled pork chops.

“I meant to stop in,” he said apologetically. He usually did when he got home from work, before going home to clean up. “I was afraid I’d get started all over again.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

“Even I can’t be a dummy all the while,” he said.

“Right,” Harry mumbled.

“Want a pork chop?” my father said, ignoring Harry’s sarcasm.

“Not really,” I said.

“Want two pork chops?”

We both grinned. He really did look sick.

“Tonight I go home,” he said.

“Mind if I use the car?”

“Go ahead. Leave it someplace I can find it is all.”

I said I would. When I got up to go, he said, “You want to come work on the road with me?”

At that moment, Untemeyer ambled by, his day done, the pockets of his black alpaca suit bulging with slips, heading for home, a destination he kept strictly secret to keep from being badgered. “They need a new flagman, right?” he said.

“Meyer,” my father said. “Somebody’s gonna follow you home one of these nights and his financial problems will all be over.”

“Not if he chooses tonight,” the bookie grumbled. “Besides, I get mugged every day by the OTB. I should have gone into prostitution.”

“Who’d want to fuck you, Meyer?” my father said.

“Any number of women,” Untemeyer said. “I got that certain something.”

“You too?” my father said.

“I get it occasionally myself,” Harry said.

“The good part is he grows the penicillin to cure it with right here on the premises,” Untemeyer said, letting the door swing shut behind him.

“Actually,” I said, “I may head back out west come September. Besides, I couldn’t do that to Mike.”

“You’d make a lot more on the road is all,” my father said. “Work until it gets cold like I do. Would they let you start school in January?”

“Sure.”

“Do that.”

“Two nights ago you were advising me to get out.”

He shrugged, cut a small wedge of pork chop and put it in his mouth. “I wouldn’t let Numb Nuts run me off, is all. She’s a cute little shit, that Ward girl.”

“That’s not it,” I assured him, not very convincingly, I thought, though it was true.

“Okay,” he said cheerfully. “You’re sure you don’t want a pork chop?”

On the way out to the Ward house I stopped at Eileen’s. She’d taken on a job cocktailing at the Holiday Inn, cutting way back
at Mike’s, so I didn’t expect her to be home. She was though. By the time I turned off the ignition, she’d come out on the little concrete slab of a back porch where she stood drying her hands on a dish towel. She was wearing an old pair of corduroy slacks and a ratty sweater. Never a pretty woman, she had always possessed an athletic quality, and there was still a little of that left, though she looked more tired now, and in the good evening light I noticed for the first time, even at a distance, that she was coloring her hair.

“Well, that explains it.” She grinned. “I knew it was Sam Hall’s car coming from a block away, but it didn’t sound like him.”

“How does he sound?” I said, grinning back at her.

“Louder,” she said. “Rougher. Faster.”

I got out. “I’ll work on it,” I promised.

“Also dumber. Sorry I upset your mother the other night.”

“She gets over things,” I said. “It’s her specialty, in fact.”

“I’ve often wondered whether she ever got over your father.”

I snorted. “Years ago. Decades.”

“I’m pretty damn near over him myself these days,” she said.

Somewhere out back of the garage I heard a motorcycle cough to life and rev. I hated to think what that meant. The noise was so deafening we had to wait for the engine to die before we could continue.

“Don’t ask me where he got the money,” she said, staring at and clean through the garage, as if she could see her son through solid wood.

“I heard about a job,” I said. “That’s why I dropped by.”

“You can mention it if you want,” she said, as if she hadn’t much faith that it would do any good. “He says he’s waiting for his ship to come in.”

I looked around. “We’re a long way from the ocean.” And Drew Littler was a lot farther than the rest of us.

I didn’t say that last, but Eileen Littler looked like she heard me, think it.

“Some people got thick skulls,” she said. “As we both know.”

“How’s the Holiday Inn?” I said.

“Pretty busy. The flat track opens next week, so we’ll be full. The high rollers all stay in Saratoga though. The ones we get give their money to the track and that’s it.”

“They don’t have a budget for waitresses?” I said. “Mike would love to give you more shifts.”

“I might,” she said. “You could mention it to him if you felt like it. I hate to ask after telling him I wanted to cut back.”

I said I would, though I hated to, knowing perfectly well why she wanted the hours. You didn’t have to be able to see through wood to figure it out, either.

“So how is he?” she said finally.

“Dad? I just left him at Harry’s trying to stare down a pork chop. He said he was going home.”

She nodded unenthusiastically. “Greenie’s is home. And Mike’s. And The Glove. And …”

“I hate to tell you, but come September I think I’ll be leaving.”

The motorcycle started up again, then died again.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “I heard you were in love.”

“No, not really,” I said. “At least I don’t think so.”

“You could do worse.”

“I know,” I said. “Especially around here.”

I could tell she didn’t care for the sound of that remark, and I had to admit, having said it, I didn’t care for the sound of it all that much myself. “I don’t know,” I concluded, which was far closer to the truth.

“You’re good for him, is the only thing,” she said.

“Not really,” I said. “I just get drunk with him. That’s all.”

She shook her head. “You’re a good influence, believe it or not. He won’t embarrass himself when you’re around, or if he thinks you might show up.”

“You’re exaggerating,” I said. “Sam Hall does as he pleases. He always has.”

“Not anymore,” she said with such conviction that I almost believed her. “You just can’t see the change. I’ll tell you something else, too, since he won’t. He loves you.”

“You too,” I said.

“Not enough,” she said, shoving her hands in the back pockets of her cords. “I almost had him once. For a while there he’d get off work, come over, eat some dinner, play gin for fun. Sometimes just us. Sometimes Wussy. He got so he could walk by the pool hall and Untemeyer and the gin mills and all of it. Sometimes he’d mention you, and I’d say call, and he’d say what for, he’s doing fine.”

“He’ll be back,” I said.

She nodded the way people do to indicate that they’ve heard
you, without necessarily buying into your point of view. “You think so.”

“Yup,” I said.

“Well … lucky me.”