The Risk Pool (65 page)

I said I didn’t know. “Maybe she loves him,” I ventured. “Maybe she’s tired of being lonely.”

In fact, he looked pretty lonely and confused himself, sitting there in a strange bar full of strange people and strange local customs that weren’t worth trying to understand. It had finally occurred to him, I think, what he never suspected when he left my mother so many years ago. That he could end up alone.

My visits to Mohawk during this period were no more successful than my father’s visits to New York, and far less frequent. If memory serves, I made the journey upstate only twice during the
decade after I left Mohawk. The timing was all wrong for the first, my father having been out of work for a while and pretty broke. I wasn’t all that flush myself, though I was working two jobs. I’d been in the city about two years then and was trying to save some money. I’d enrolled in a program in publishing at one of the city colleges for the fall, which would mean the end of one of my jobs. Something—some fucking thing, as my father would have put it—was going to have to give. I was going to have to find a cheaper, dirtier, less safe apartment, or take out a loan, or get a roommate, or something. I think that in the back of my mind I hoped that during my visit, the subject of money would come up, that I’d tell my father my plans, that he’d have some money for once and float me a loan. I’m ashamed to admit that I also remembered the loan I’d unknowingly floated him so many years before. That, I’ve concluded, is one of the worst things about not having money; it causes you to recall what people owe you, or what you imagine they owe you.

But the subject of money never came up. We went out to dinner at The Elms the night I arrived in Mohawk. Mike had bought the place back the year before and it looked just the same as it had when my father had taken me there as a boy. I half expected a young Jack Ward to swagger in wearing a cream-colored suit, his lovely dark-haired little daughter in tow. Mike’s wife Irma was back in her old role as hostess, escorting couples into the dining room with an expression that suggested her indifference to whether the entire party dropped dead. She appeared genuinely pleased to see me though, and my father and I got the best table in the place. It had had a reserved sign on it, but she discreetly removed this and tucked it under her arm.

“How come I don’t get this kind of treatment when I come here alone?” my father wanted to know.

“You just answered your own question, didn’t you.” Irma glowered at him.

“You better marry me pretty soon,” my father said. “Otherwise I’m going to stop asking and then you’ll be stuck with Mike for the rest of your life.”

“I’m stuck with the both of you either way.”

We ate a good dinner, and when we finished, I said, “Let me, for once.”

No check had come and I was beginning to suspect that my
father had called Mike sometime that afternoon to see if he could take care of the bill later.

We went into the bar afterward and had a drink, which my father let me pay for. “You show the kid your elbow?” Mike asked my father.

“Big mouth,” my father said.

I’d noticed him rubbing it during dinner and had been on the verge of asking about it, but gotten sidetracked.

“It’s a beauty, huh?” my father said now, as he rolled up his sleeve. Mike set one of the red goblet bar candles next to the elbow, so we could see. The grotesqueness of the injury took my breath away. The skin covering the elbow was stretched tight over the hairless, tennis-ball-sized protuberance.

I said, “Jesus, Dad.”

“Just water is all, the doctor says …”

“
Their
doctor says. What do you expect? You think they want to pay disability?”

It had happened in the spring. Up till then he’d been tending bar for Mike and things had been fine, except people in places like The Elms were always ordering drinks like banana daiquiris, which my father hated making, so when he had a chance to go back on the road he told Mike to hell with banana daiquiris and piña coladas and all the other asshole drinks. He’d fallen only a few feet off the form truck, but his elbow had taken the full impact. The surgeons had done what they could, pieced the shattered elbow back together, said that in a month or two, with a little luck and some physical therapy, he’d get back ninety percent use of the arm. For therapy he’d worked the other side of the bar, bending his elbow like he was told.

“It looks worse today than when you got out of the hospital,” Mike said.

“I know it,” my father conceded. “What do you want from me. They say I can work.”

“Fuck ’em. Come back and work for me. I’ll put Ned on too. Weekends you can work together.”

“What good would I be? I can’t straighten my arm past here.” My father demonstrated.

“Right. You can’t tend bar, but you can work construction,” Mike said, shaking his head. “Your old man’s got rocks upstairs.”

“I just happen to be tough,” my father told him. “Some guys are. Other guys are pussies. I’m not naming any names.”

I was still working on the fact that my father had had a serious accident and an operation to boot, and hadn’t called. “Thanks for telling me about all this,” I said when Mike was gone.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “What would you have done? Come down here and held my hand while they operated?”

“If I had to have an operation, wouldn’t you want to know?”

“That’s different.” He grinned. “I’d explain it if I thought you were smart enough to understand.”

He rolled his sleeve back down, with some difficulty, because the elbow was still sore and there was much more of it than the shirt was designed to accommodate.

“We could try it … if you wanted to tend bar …”

“I was planning on taking some classes in the city this fall,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Glad to hear it.”

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected the slightest shade of disappointment in his voice, perhaps the result of my answering so quickly, as if the idea of returning to Mohawk and working with him had merited no serious consideration. But if he was disappointed, he covered it quickly, spinning around on his bar stool to offer his other hand and elbow on the bar. “Anyhow, this is the one I arm-wrestle with.”

It was also the one that was missing part of a thumb from the earlier accident. It occurred to me then that my father was losing a subtle war of attrition.

My more recent visit to Mohawk was about three years after the one I just related. I’d flown in to Albany on the last commuter flight on Friday night. Our plan was to catch the Travers Stakes at Saratoga the next afternoon, spend the evening catching up (it had been nearly nine months since we’d spoken on the telephone, over a year since we’d seen each other), then I’d take the bus back to the city on Sunday.

I figured on an hour or so of quiet reading time in the airport before he arrived. My father always either lost track of the clock and left Mohawk about the same time the plane was landing, or left in plenty of time but got off at the wrong Albany exit and then claimed they moved the airport again. But this evening, to my surprise, he was right there at the gate when I got off my plane, looking as if he had secret doubts about being in the right place.
Also, he was wearing glasses. But even with them I spotted him long before he picked me out of the crowd.

“Well,” he said, when we shook. “You
were
on there.”

“I said I would be.”

I couldn’t help staring at his glasses, which were missing one arm. The other dutifully hooked one ear, providing an imperfect anchor for the lenses, which balanced precariously on the bridge of his nose.

“I’d about given up,” he said.

“You expected me to be in first class?”

“Why not? You’re getting to be such a big shot down there,” he said, taking the small bag I was carrying.

“A little shot,” I assured him. When I’d called to say I was coming I’d told him about the junior editorship I’d just been promoted to. “Just slightly bigger than a year ago when I was no shot at all.”

“Well, that’s all right,” he said. “My son, the book editor. What do you think of my cheaters? I bought them so I could see the racing form.”

“Most people like the kind that hook behind
both
ears.”

“I like them that way myself,” he admitted. “In fact, these were that way until I sat on ’em. I could probably fix them if I could see, but to fix them I have to take them off, and then I can’t see anymore. They’re just for night driving anyhow. Even the risk pool wouldn’t insure me if I didn’t get them.”

“Don’t they usually give you a spare set?”

“Yup. I lost those two days after I sat on these. If I could just lose this pair, I’d go back and order some more. But every time I walk off some asshole yells at me to take my glasses with me. You son of a bitch, I tell him. You couldn’t yell at me when I walked off and left my
good
pair. Every time I try to lose these bastards you notice.”

By this time we were outside the terminal on the ramp across from the short-term parking, which was only a quarter full. I started looking for a car that might be my father’s.

“Where you going?” my father wanted to know. He’d stopped by a pale yellow Subaru compact parked squarely in the middle of a loading zone. He slipped a key into its trunk and turned. There was a reassuring thunk, but when he lifted up, the trunk stayed shut. “Bitch,” he said. “It does this sometimes in wet weather.”

I looked around. “It rained here today?”

He went around to the driver’s side and slung my bag in the backseat, already piled high with miscellaneous junk. He shook his head no. “Why, did it rain in the city?”

I grinned at him across the Subaru’s hood. “It’s good to be home.”

“Get in then,” he said. “We aren’t home yet, in case you didn’t notice.”

He was right, too.

Between the airport and the Thruway entrance he told me all about the Subaru, which somebody’d talked him into buying. That little shit? he wanted to know, but then he figured what the hell. We’d taught the Japs a thing or two. Maybe they’d learned how to make cars. People said they did, and the guy who’d owned it didn’t want an arm and a leg, so …

What troubled me, but apparently not my father, was the way people kept honking and swerving around us. My father honked back, waved, and continued talking. People honked hellos at him all the time in Mohawk, where they knew him, and he saw no reason why they shouldn’t in Albany, where they didn’t.

“Do you have your lights on?” I said finally, noticing that the dash wasn’t lit up.

He looked down over the rims of his glasses and had to let go of the wheel to catch them when they fell off. “Should be,” he said.

The Thruway entrance was a hundred yards away. We pulled in. When the attendant at the gatehouse handed us our ticket, he said, “Your lights, Mac.”

“Right,” my father said, and he put the Subaru in gear. “Not this shit again,” he said, flicking the light switch in and out. I tried the radio, windshield wipers, cigarette lighter. Nothing. My father tried the turn signals. Nothing. We merged onto the Thruway, regardless, a big sedan careening around us at the last second. I put on my seatbelt.

“I’ll show you a little trick,” my father said when a double-hitch Peterbilt roared by and tugged at us. Slipping into its wake, my father goosed the Subaru, which strained dutifully until be got right on the Peterbilt’s big, well-lit ass end.

My father, pleased with himself, looked over at me from above
the black rims of his cockeyed glasses. “You worry too much,” he said. “You always did.”

I checked the speedometer, which was vibrating between sixty-five and seventy. Mohawk was forty black miles away. I wondered if, when we hit the Peterbilt, I’d be able to get down quickly enough to avoid decapitation.

“I’ve always wanted a Subaru,” I said, trying to sound more full of admiration than terror. “But there’s not much point in owning a car in the city.”

“I can’t live without one,” my father said, punching in the cigarette lighter, having already forgotten. After a few seconds he began to lean slightly toward the lighter in anticipation of its clicking out. His Camel dangled from his lips as he divided his attention between the big truck only a few feet in front of us and the recalcitrant lighter. Finally it dawned on him. “Argh!” he said, pulling the cold lighter out, examining it, putting it to his stubbled cheek to make sure. Then he tossed it out the window and turned to me. “So,” he said. “Tell me about this editor shit.”

“Editor
ship
,” I corrected, and pointed at the Peterbilt. “Are those brake lights?”

I had only one other contact with Mohawk in the decade after I came to New York. It came in the form of a newspaper clipping, a month old by the time I received it.
ELDERLY WOMAN VICTIM OF CARNIVAL RIDE
, the headline said in bold black letters, though the account beneath was slender. Miss Rachael Agajanian, a resident of the Mohawk Valley Nursing Home, had been one of a party taken on an outing to the Mohawk Fair. According to witnesses, her wheelchair had rolled backward off the merry-go-round when the attendant had gone to the aid of another resident of the home who, seated on one of the stationary benches, had unaccountably begun to scream. Miss Agajanian’s wheelchair had become entangled in the machinery and been dragged, with its occupant, several complete revolutions, before the ride, which had been left on automatic, could be stopped.

The clipping from the
Mohawk Republican
was inside a small envelope; there was no note. When my father called a month later I asked him about the incident and, predictably, he had a lot more information than the newspaper account, and some of it may even have been true. The mangled old woman had been
rushed to the New Mohawk Medical Services Center, where the emergency room staff immediately began to attend to her. She had been quite a sight but the doctors and nurses did their best with her. Unfortunately, at some point, someone explained how the accident happened, that the old woman had been thrown from the merry-go-round, whereupon the entire team dissolved. Each time their hilarity was about to subside, someone else entered the room, looked at the patient and wanted to know what on earth had happened, setting everyone off again. This continued until the patient died.