The Risk Pool (61 page)

On his back beneath the new bike, Drew Littler reminded me of the boy he’d been back when I spotted for him in the garage. Much of the former muscle had gone soft now, but when he lay on his back he flattened out and his blondish hair hung straight back, just as it had when we were boys. I wondered if it was strictly necessary for him to lie on his back that way. After all, it wasn’t a car he was underneath. “A one-owner,” he said, looking up at the big Harley critically, then at me, my shadow having fallen across him.

“Who only used it to go back and forth to church,” I said.

“That and haul his boat up to the lake,” he agreed. “Still do a hundred and twenty.”

“Who’d want to go a hundred and twenty on a motorcycle?” It was a dumb question.

“Let’s,” he said seriously. “Hop on.”

He stood.

When I said thanks anyway, he swung a big thigh over the saddle and the Harley roared to life so loud I took an involuntary step back. I had to wait for him to throttle down, and even then I had to shout.

“I heard about a job.”

He gunned the engine again, listened critically, then shut it down.

“Out at The Bachelors,” I said, a little too loud, now that it was quiet again. I realized then that I had been wrong to come. The sound of my own voice was enough to convince me. “You know where that is?”

“Tending bar?” he said.

“Crowd control.”

He grinned. “Bouncing. You think I’d be good at that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know I’d think twice before starting trouble.”

“You be smart, no bigger than you are.” He stood straight and faced me with this observation, sucking in his gut. It pissed me off a little, but I was thinking twice.

“I should mention they kicked the shit out of the last one and stuffed him in a dumpster.”

“What’s the pay?”

“How would I know?”

“You know about the job.”

“I just heard about the guy in the dumpster.”

“And you thought of me.”

“Right away,” I said.

He nodded. “You sure you don’t want to go for a ride?”

“Positive,” I told him, wondering if he was considering strapping me on against my will. To change the subject, I said, “Guess who I saw the other night.”

He waited.

“Roy Heinz,” I told him. “You remember Willie?”

“What of it?” he said, his face a mask.

“Nothing. I wondered if you ever heard from him is all.”

“Why would I hear from Willie Heinz?”

Somehow, it occurred to me, we were on the verge of hostilities again. His desire to provoke them seemed to have rhythmic peaks and troughs independent of the conversation itself. “No reason,” I said. “He looked up to you.”

“Listen,” nodding vaguely in the general direction of the Ward house, miles away across the park and highway. “You can have it all, okay?”

The weird part was that I understood him. No reference had ever been more oblique or sudden, but I had the feeling that this was what we’d been talking about all along, or what he imagined we’d been talking about.

“Have what?” I said, trying to submerge the powerful feeling I’d had about him ever since the evening my father had beat him at arm wrestling and he’d threatened to break the arm he was suspended from. Drew Littler was insane.

But his eyes went vague again and he offered me a big paw to shake. “Thanks for the tip on the job.”

“Sure,” I said, accepting his offer, whatever it might mean. Then he kicked the Harley to life, did a circuit around the dirt yard, one booted foot dragging until the bike straightened and roared down the drive, narrowly missing my father’s convertible.

Eileen’s white face was in the only window that looked out on the backyard and our eyes met across it as the Harley burned through gears and stop signs all the way to the distant highway.

That night at the Wards’ was the first of a new working arrangement. Tria’s mother met me at the door and explained that her daughter was not at home. The pages I had worked on the previous Friday had been typed up and added to the others in the plastic tray. Over three hundred pages worth now. About half the manuscript, I guessed.

Nor was Tria in evidence the rest of the week, though when I arrived in the evenings the air was often rich with her perfume. The previous night’s work was always typed neatly and added face-down in the stack. Even more disturbing than her absence from the proceedings was her mother’s renewed presence. I began to feel as though I’d been the victim of some cruel slight of hand. I’d started out wooing the pretty daughter and ended up with the old hag, the basic plot of countless bedroom farces, only in my case the switch had been made not in the dark but rather in broad daylight as I looked on. Among the many reasons I wished ardently for Tria’s return was the grotesque possibility that someone would tumble to the fact that Mrs. Ward and I were alone in the house every evening and draw an unnatural conclusion.

I didn’t have to search the house to know that Tria was not there. Her yellow Chevette was always gone when I arrived, her lingering perfume strong at first, then dissipating as the evening wore on. I probably would have worked late and waited for the sound of her car pulling into the garage were it not for the fact that Mrs. Ward no longer retired at nine, the way she had when Tria and I were working together. Now it was clearly her intention to remain up until I finished each night, as if she didn’t trust me to lock up on my way out. When she yawned, I suggested she go to bed, but she wouldn’t hear of it, no matter how her eyelids
drooped. She fed us strong dark coffee that wired me good, but hadn’t the slightest effect upon herself.

The main reason I wished she’d go to bed was so that I could stay up late and be done with the whole project as soon as possible. I no longer really wanted to go out there. Drew Littler’s remark that I could have it all, as far as he was concerned, rang in my ears, and the small library seemed more claustrophobic each night. As I paced around its perimeter to stretch my legs, clear my head, search for oxygen, I began to feel about it the way I suspected Jack Ward himself must have felt—that there was nothing I valued there, nothing of myself, nothing I wanted.

Why then did I make the journey up that hill through the dark corridor of trees each evening? Part of it may have been, as Drew Littler suggested, the rather satisfying notion that I was permitted to drive my father’s convertible between the stone pillars that had once been a barrier to Drew Littler and me. Perhaps the fact that I had a standing invitation to visit continued to mean something long after the spell of the white jewel house itself had been broken. Maybe, in the end, that’s what such spells and such houses are about.

And, too, part of the reason I continued to haunt the Ward House that August was guilt. I wanted to square things with Tria—though I wasn’t sure whether this was possible or even what it might entail. She had taken me into her bed, and I had betrayed her in the classic way that Mohawk men betrayed their women, perhaps the way most men betray most women. I planned a rather elaborate confession on the subject, an admission that I was unworthy of her, that she could do far better, that I was and always had been both selfish and corrupt. Moreover I had been treating her the way my father had treated my mother, the way
her
father had treated
her
mother. I was perpetuating … well, I wasn’t sure what, but I was perpetuating something. All of this was supposed to make her feel better. I know it made me feel better (I was twenty-four) as I rehearsed these observations.

But the real reason I kept pushing my father’s convertible up the hill each evening was that in working over Tria’s grandfather’s history, I had rediscovered something of the strange, almost mystical delight I had felt in the Mohawk Free Library those years I had lived with my father. There in my cool little corner of the stacks, surrounded by books and periodicals I but dimly
understood, I had felt connected to something as large and wondrous as the planet itself. With no teacher to direct my reading or to tell me in advance what to make of it, there was the off chance that I would go in a new direction. I often chose books by smell and was often rewarded. Sometimes I would look inside the back cover, where I would find a borrowers’ history, due dates stamped in purple ink. Volumes that had not been checked out in twenty or thirty years held a special interest for me. I felt like I was in direct communication with the book’s lonely author, that I would not have to raise my voice to be heard above the clamor of recent due dates.

I now felt a similar intimacy with Tria’s grandfather, whose various relics made him a palpable presence in that icon-riddled room. I liked the idea that a man, many years ago, had labored over writings that I now labored over, that I could look inside his mind, see what occupied his thoughts, or at least those thoughts he chose to share with the world. And I wondered what he would have thought of me, a young man he couldn’t have imagined or predicted, who entered his house, and twisted his sentences around until they suited himself. At the time I imagined that the author must be terribly grateful.

And I did love twisting those sentences around. It’s a pleasure that I fear very few people can comprehend, much less share. Surgeons who perform intricate operations that allow twisted, maimed, hulking cripples to walk upright may know something of the editor’s delight. I can only say that I discovered that summer in working over—and brother did I ever work it over—
The History of Mohawk County
, the joy of probing the opaque sentence until it surrendered something akin to meaning (
this
is what the son of a bitch meant!), making flexible (sometimes loosey-goosey, I fear) that which had been soldered stiff in a grimace of contorted syntax, giving energy and momentum to sentences stalled and flooded, like a carburetor, by leaden words. I was having a ball, and I do not regret in the least the many hours I labored over
The History of Mohawk County
. In fact, I didn’t even regret it years later when I saw a display of the book in the small front window of Ford’s Stationers, the closest Mohawk ever came to a bookstore. Having been rejected by dozens of commercial and university publishers, Mrs. Ward had somehow managed to convince a local press to do a limited edition. The editor, perhaps on his own initiative or, more likely, on the advice of the
good Mrs. Ward herself, restored to the original every one of the thousand or so editorial changes I made, offering to the book-reading public of Mohawk County, her father’s vision, complete, unmolested, faithful, and, trust me, utterly unreadable.

Seeing the modest edition, every copy of which was displayed in Ford’s window, unless there was a carton or two in the den of the Ward house, made me feel sad for Tria’s mother, because her plan for her father’s work was nothing less than grandiose. I learned of it gradually that summer when she became the companion of my evenings. Meeting me at the front door, she would insist that I have “something cool, you know” before I sat down to work. Then she would tell me about her father, who seemed to me, even as Mrs. Ward described him, nearly as frozen as his syntax. That she worshiped him beyond measure was evident. That his ghost had intruded into her and her husband’s bedroom seemed to me both then and now as the safest of inferences. That he had whispered counsel to her on long nights when Jack Ward did not come home, perhaps even the odd “I-told-you-so,” was also a good bet. I doubt Mrs. Ward ever looked at her husband without imagining her father standing there beside him for the purposes of comparison.

And when Jack Ward had died, the ultimate I-told-you-so, Mrs. Ward had meekly returned to her father and begun to formulate her plan to offer him to the community. He had helped her through a bad marriage, saved her life by providing such a stern model of upright behavior. She began to see that it was wrong to keep such a man for her own private use when the entire community was in such dire need of a paradigm, an example of rectitude beyond reproach. Mohawk, Mrs. Ward explained to me, was a town that had lost its pride, its sense of self-worth, its recollections of its own pioneer history. The hearty men and women who had driven the savage Iroquois north and west, built long roads through the dark forest, erected churches and established settlements, had not been drunkards and fornicators and welfare recipients. They had been strong, earnest, God-fearing men and women who knew adversity, self-sacrifice and hard times. And when they’d won their battle with the wilderness and the wild heathens who had roamed the forest, these men begat scholars—men of intellectual courage and wisdom like her father, who had bequeathed to subsequent generations the gift of memory, the knowledge of great times and deeds.

If Mohawk could just be introduced to her father, Mrs. Ward felt certain, then the whole community would rediscover the pride that had lain dormant for so long. In the beginning she had doubted she would be able to go through with it—sharing her father with the world, that is. But then she realized that he was large, that he contained multitudes. And again he whispered in her ear, confirmed the wisdom of the course she had chosen. Use me, he had bravely insisted, and so she would. Because it wasn’t just Mohawk, after all. There were towns all over the nation that would benefit. Didn’t most Americans, even those now living—if you could call it living—in the hateful big cities, didn’t they have their roots in places like the young Mohawk? Wouldn’t all Americans answer the call to remember if sufficiently motivated?

She was thinking best seller. And who could blame her? After all, she was broke. As stony as stony could be. It was Tria who confirmed this later, when my work on the history was done, after Wussy, whose travels were wide and contacts myriad, came into Mike’s one afternoon and wanted to know what the hell Jack Ward’s daughter wanted with working as a cocktail waitress in Amsterdam. I said I was sure I didn’t know. He’d probably heard wrong. But I knew he hadn’t. Unlike just about everybody in Mohawk, Wussy’s information was usually correct. Besides, as Tria herself had observed, some things were too terrible to be anything but true.