The Risk Pool (16 page)

The street was deserted, except for a few cars outside the Mohawk Grill. I pedaled slowly up Hospital Hill, and from there past the stone pillars and into Myrtle Park. I was glad for the yellow windbreaker, the air was so full of autumn. Up in the park, the sun only found its way among the pines in splotches. Since I had the place to myself, I raced along the winding paths until the chill in the air felt good, then rode over to my favorite vista and leaned my bike against a tree.

Far out across the highway, the white jewel house I always admired gleamed in the clean morning light atop its own hill, and as usual I wondered what sort of people lived there, and what it must be like to wake up in such a big house, and what they thought about when they looked out from their vast privacy across the highway into the wild green of Myrtle Park. But maybe they didn’t look in my direction at all. Maybe way off beyond them was another gleaming house on another hill with an even better view, and maybe they looked at that. Or it could be that they just drew the blinds and didn’t go gazing off anywhere. Whoever they were, they had to be pretty happy about things.

Directly below me, among the mounds of junk, a yellow mutt appeared and sniffed around for a good place. I tossed a pebble, which rattled off a car fender. I studied the shack with the corregated iron roof apprehensively. I knew my father was back downtown, snoring on the sofa, yet right then I felt him there below me too, as if there were no contradiction to his being two places at once. It was such a scary idea that I got on my bike and pedaled back downtown.

I got spooked again when I dismounted in front of Klein’s Department Store. In one of the windows stood a boy mannequin wearing the same plaid shirt and green chinos I had on. His arms were extended outward from his sides, frozen in expectation, as if there were someone nearby he meant to embrace. But he had the small window all to himself and there was nothing much on his side of the glass.

* * *

My father was in the bathroom when I got upstairs, and Dave Garroway, Chet Huntley’s identical twin, was on the snowy television. I leaned my bike against the wall near the door and tried to think if there was something I should be doing. If I’d been in my mother’s house, there would have been something, but here it was different. Making the bed seemed like a good idea, so I did that. I was finishing up when the bathroom door opened and he came out in his shorts, smelling of lime, his cheeks smooth, his hair wet and shiny.

He seemed to have taken waking up and finding me gone pretty much in stride, though he looked me over carefully, in as much as I was back again and he had a minute. “The pants are a little long,” he observed. “How come you’re a runt?”

That didn’t seem to require an answer, so I didn’t say anything. He stood there waiting though, and it seemed an awfully big room for two people with so little to say to each other.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“How come you’re a runt?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

That seemed to satisfy him. He nodded meaningfully, as if maybe
he
had an idea why I was a runt. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

He scratched himself, and for a minute, I thought he meant right then. I envisioned the two of us crossing Main Street, me in my new yellow windbreaker, him in his undershorts.

In the living room he pulled on the same pants he’d draped over the sofa the night before. “You eat?”

Like most of his questions, this one caused me to hesitate.
Did
I eat?
Had
I eaten? Did he want to know if I was hungry? Whether I usually ate breakfast? Whether eating was customary with me, as with other mortals? I took a stab.

“Sure,” I said.

“What?”

I blinked. “What?”

“What did you eat?”

“Nothing. I meant I’m hungry,” I said.

He tucked his shirt in, and zipped his fly, the television having for the moment caught his attention. He placed each black-shoed
foot on the arm of the sofa to tie his shoelaces, then pocketed his keys and brushed the cigarette ashes off the coffee table and onto the floor “Well?”

We went down to the street. I walked right past the convertible, figuring he meant to go to the diner across the street. Instead, he got in the car. I retraced my steps and got in too, just in time to get cuffed in the head. “Pay attention,” he said.

“All right,” I said.

“Smile.”

I did my best.

We pulled away from the curb and rode silently toward the outskirts of town. For some reason, my spirits began to dip again. I was wearing new clothes and didn’t have much to complain about, but I couldn’t dispel the feeling that somehow my personal fortunes had taken an unmistakable turn for the worse. Everywhere, the leaves had begun to turn, but their brilliant oranges and yellows failed to cheer me. I thought about my grandfather. Fourth of July. Mohawk Fair. Eat the Bird, and Winter.

Out near the highway my father pulled into a steep driveway and cut the engine. A curtain in the small brown house at the end of the drive twitched, then was still. My father got out, so I did too, confused as usual. There was a front door, but we went around back where there was a large, unshaded concrete patio. A blond-haired boy in a thin t-shirt, who looked three or four years older than I, was working on a dismantled motorcycle, parts of which were strewn all over the patio.

“Hello, Knucklehead,” my father said when the boy looked up. I recognized the boy as being from Mohawk High, but didn’t know his name. He was big and good-looking enough to notice on the street, even if the girls he let hang on him were ordinary to ugly. He stood straight, studied my father for a second, then pointed at his own dick with both index fingers.

“Don’t say it,” my father advised.

“She’s inside,” the boy said, bending to pick up a greasy wrench.

“Say hello to Zero,” my father said, nudging me. “He thinks he’s tough.”

“Hey,” the boy nodded at me for a split second before returning to my father. “I
am
tough.”

“You just think so,” my father said.

“Someday we’ll find out,” the boy said, tossing the wrench into the air, catching it nimbly by the handle.

“Careful,” my father said. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“Leave him alone!” came a voice from one of the windows directly above us. I jumped, but my father seemed to be half expecting it.

“You dressed?” my father said, mounting the concrete steps to the back door.

“It’s almost nine-thirty. What do you think?”

My father held the screen door for me and we went in. There was a woman my mother’s age at the kitchen sink doing dishes, about a week’s worth, it looked like. Soapy to the elbows, she studied my father critically, as if she suspected him of bringing her some more.

“Just wanted to make sure,” he said. “I got a weak ticker.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you, but it’s not your heart that’s weak.” She dried her hands and forearms and stood looking at him. She was a gangly woman, sort of pretty and not pretty at the same time, with lively eyes that conveyed both amusement and irritation.

My father touched the coffee pot with the back of his hand and, finding it warm, opened an empty cupboard, looking for a cup. The woman tossed him a wet plastic one from the mound on the drainboard.

“I’m Eileen,” she said, offering a red hand, “since nobody’s going to introduce us.”

My father ignored her, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Didn’t work last night?”

“Yes, I worked last night,” she said angrily. “Some people have to.”

“I dropped by,” he said. “You weren’t there.”

“Then you dropped by after eleven. I was early waitress. For once.”

“Mike lose his head?”

“Must have. You could have called. My phone still works.”

“I got tied up.”

“Mmm,” she said.

I had drifted off during the conversation. As usual, everybody seemed to know my father better than I did, and I always ended up feeling like an outsider. It had been the same when I was a kid. My father and Wussy had talked between themselves for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch, and when I was finally spoken to I’d be surprised to discover myself still present, a palpable if relatively unimportant part of the scene. Now, for some reason, my
father and the woman called Eileen were suddenly looking at me, and I felt myself flush. “What?” I said.

“What do you mean, what?” my father said. “Try and stay awake.”

“Tell him to take a long walk off a short dock,” Eileen suggested to me.

“If you don’t start being nice to me, I’m not going to take you out for breakfast,” he said.

Eileen snorted. “Breakfast! Look at this mess.”

My father shrugged. “Let Worthless do the dishes.”

“That’ll be the day he ever does a dish,” Eileen said, glancing out the window to where her son knelt beside the motorcycle, her expression half affection, half exasperation.

“He will if I ask him,” my father said.

“You never ask him anything. The only thing you know how to do is threaten and call names.”

“He pays attention, anyhow.”

“That’s not the sort of attention I want.”

“It would be a start.”

Eileen grabbed a light coat from a wooden rack near the door. “Don’t go telling me about my kid.”

“All he needs is his ass kicked,” my father smiled.

“We won’t discuss it,” she said. “Shut up and take me out to breakfast.”

We went outside, single file—Eileen, then me, then my father. “Don’t talk to him,” Eileen said. “Don’t say a word.”

The boy looked up, saw us, nodded knowingly.

“Sam,” Eileen warned.

But my father had already moved past her. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Zero,” he said. “I got a job for you.”

The boy held up a greasy bolt for inspection. “Good. I get five bucks an hour.”

My father snorted. “You’ll never get five bucks an hour if you live to be a hundred. Unless it’s to go away and not come back. In the meantime, there’s a big stack of dirty dishes in on the sink, and your mother’s worked every night this week.”

“So?”

“So when we get back from breakfast, it’d be nice to see them done.”

“Ignore him,” Eileen said.

“Don’t worry,” the boy said, his voice even more pointedly contemptuous of her than of my father.

“Who buys your food?” my father said. “Who gives you a place to stay? Who bought you this motorcycle you couldn’t live without?”

“Not you.”

“No,” my father admitted. “But I’m the one that’s going to pound the snot out of you some day if you don’t start remembering.”

There was a flicker of fear in the boy’s eyes, though he covered it quickly. “Someday, right Sammy?” he said.

“That’s right.”

Eileen had gotten in the car and she laid on the horn until my father turned his back on the boy. “The soap’s under the sink, in case you forgot,” he said.

“I’ll think about it,” the boy said, and his eyes met mine before I could avoid them. His were sullen and dull now, as if he’d already had the snot pounded out of him and had never gotten over it.

“The dishes will be done by the time we get back,” my father said quietly when he slid in behind the wheel.

“I want you … to leave him … alone,” Eileen said, her voice a knife edge.

“
I
want some breakfast,” my father said.

I’d gotten in the backseat, and when he turned around so he could see to back out of the driveway, I instinctively turned around too, so I didn’t see the cuff coming. It caught me right on the cowlick. “Don’t grow up thinking you’re tough,” he said.

“Like your father,” Eileen added.

Until my father told me not to, I worried about Rose not being able to afford fifteen dollars a week to have me clean the salon. It was a lot of money, enough to make a wealthy man of me, even if I only banked ten a week. “Don’t lose sleep over Rose,” my
father advised. “She needs a wheelbarrow to cart all her money around.”

I didn’t see how that could be. How much business could she attract up those three flights of narrow, unlit stairs over Klein’s Department Store? The only people who ever seemed to use them were my father and Rose and me. I understood only when I actually saw the salon that first Sunday. Rose’s business came up by elevator from the store below. Her ladies, most of them elderly, did their shopping and their hair in one trip. At closing time, an accordionlike mesh gate was closed and locked, preventing entry from the elevator. Similar grids were used in the department store on the two floors below.

And my father was right. Rose had about the best business in town. That first Sunday he accompanied me to make sure I did the job right. It turned out he’d done the job himself when he was laid off. He showed me where the big vacuum and the cleaning supplies were. Then he showed me Rose’s big black ledger, which she kept in a poorly fastened drawer at the receptionist’s station at the elevator door. Along the left margin were the hours and half hours of the workdays—Monday through Saturday—and six columns across the pages which corresponded to the six chairs spaced evenly before the long wall mirror and individual sinks. For every hour and every chair at least one appointment was scheduled and dollar amounts recorded, sometimes in ink, sometimes lightly in pencil. We totaled up one day and multiplied by six to arrive at a figure for the week. I was so stunned by it that I went back over our calculations to find out where we’d goofed. We hadn’t though.

“You should see the house she’s got up on Kings Road,” my father said, making himself comfortable with the racing form in one of Rose’s six reclining chairs.

I doubted it could be as grand as the jeweled house on the hill across the highway from Myrtle Park.

“Jack Ward’s place?” my father said when I described it.

I doubted there could be more than one, so I said that was it. “What does he do?” I said, figuring he must have a pretty good business, like Rose’s.

“Not a goddamn thing, that I know of,” my father said, not particularly interested. When he studied the racing form, he was hard to engage in idle chatter.

“Where does it come from?” I said. “The money, I mean.”