The Risk Pool (18 page)

“As long as I don’t end up next to you,” said Eileen, who claimed that hell would be having to talk to Sam Hall throughout eternity.

“Don’t get me riled,” he threatened, “or I’ll put Zero in there with you, too.”

“You plan to outlive
everybody
?” she said.

“Yes, I do,” he said, nudging me.

About the time the three of us sat down, the motorcycle would roar up the driveway and Drew—that was the boy’s name—would saunter in, plant his helmet on the table next to the bowl of creamed corn, and spoon about half the mashed potatoes onto his plate by way of hello. If he made conversation at all, it was with me. He’d taken, at least once, most of the classes I was now in, and he considered himself an authority on every teacher in Nathan Littler Junior High. “
That
asshole,” he’d say, not without affection. Having finally made it to Mohawk High, he was nostalgic about my school, where he’d enjoyed himself immensely. Most afternoons, when the junior high let out, Drew would be out front astraddle his motorcycle, in the shadow of the big statue of Nathan Littler, his own distant relative.

A meal at the Littlers’ was a feast of tension which always seemed to me on the verge of erupting into open hostility. When the motorcycle roared up the drive, Eileen always warned my father to be good for once, but his promise seldom amounted to much. Having watched Drew fill his plate with potatoes, my father would nudge me and nod across the table. “Not a bad life,” he’d say. “Ride around on your motorcycle all the while. Take money for gas from your mother. Show up for a free dinner when you’re hungry. Eat without bothering to wash your hands. Then say, ‘So long, Ma,’ and off you go. Ma can do the dishes, wash the clothes, work all night while you ride around and pretend you’re a big shot. Not a bad life, if you can swing it.”

“You my father?” Drew would say.

“I wouldn’t admit it if I were.”

“Don’t blame you. Be embarrassing to have a kid that could kick your ass.”

“Any time you want to try,” my father would say, carefully cutting a chop. It was part of the way they talked to each other at such times that neither would look up from his plate. I often thought that if either had made eye contact with the other, blood would have been shed. The expressions on their faces were terrifying, and I was glad they concentrated on their food.

“Let’s all mind our own business, shall we?” Eileen would suggest. “I like Ned better than either of you. At least he doesn’t go around flexing his muscles all the time.”

“Hasn’t got any,” Drew pointed out, not untruthfully.

I would flush twice over, once because Eileen had remembered I was there and said something nice, and again for lack of musculature. I liked Eileen a great deal. I liked the way she didn’t get bent out of shape about things. My mother could have learned all sorts of things from her if she’d felt like it.

Actually, Drew and I got along fine too. After dinner I’d go out to the garage with him and act as spotter while he bench pressed. He was only five-ten, three inches shorter than my father, and he had a fleshy midriff, but his arms and shoulders were massive. I very much admired his strength. When he lay on his back on the narrow bench, his blond hair hung straight down and a single blue vein on his broad forehead pulsed when he held his breath before exploding into the lift. The weight of the bar was something he seemed to take personally, as if in his imagination he had infused the cold metal with life and personality. He shoved the steel up and out of his way with savage contempt, as if its mere presence offended him. On those occasions when he misjudged his strength and needed me to help guide the wobbling bar back to its resting place, his expression darkened and he would give up, refusing to take weight off the bar, refusing to try a second lift. He had failed, and that was all there was to it. He would then turn his attention to the cycle, pulling it all apart, as if while lying on his back beneath the great weight of the bar, he’d suddenly remembered something wrong with the way it was running. He’d spend the rest of the evening cursing the machine.

But Drew was seldom defeated by the bar, and when his first lift was successful, he would continue his workout until exhaustion
finally overtook him. Then he would get up from the bench—the only lifting he seemed interested in was from flat on his back—his chest swelling with accomplishment, his blond hair wet with perspiration, the blue vein on his forehead still throbbing intensely, as if its angry excited pulsing contained the very center of his being. Then he would fling one leg over the bike, kick back the stand, and roar down the steep drive. You could hear him changing gears all the way to the highway, and by the time he returned half an hour later his pale hair would be dry again and the blue vein gone from his forehead.

Sometimes, depending on his mood, he would take me for a ride. The first time scared me good, because he took off before I could locate the pegs to rest my feet on, and when we took sharp turns my feet went straight out like wings. Leaning into the turns seemed foolhardy, and for a long time I refused to do it. Often I leaned in the opposite direction to make up for what Drew was doing in front of me, so that our bodies formed a V, Drew leaning into the danger, I away from it. Eventually I got better, but seeing the pavement whiz by a few inches beneath my kneecap was something I never did get used to.

In the beginning we just circumnavigated a few blocks, but our rides got progressively longer. One night in late October, instead of just disturbing a few peaceful streets, Drew took us out to the highway and let the bike full out. On our right, the dark expanse of Myrtle Park, rising abruptly against the dusk, flew by. On the left, off in the distance, was the radio tower, its twin red lights pulsing. I hadn’t as much hair as Drew, but what I did have stood straight up and I felt the exhilaration of raw speed so strongly that I had all I could do not to howl in animal pleasure. Drew was rock solid as the bike itself, and together we leaned into the turns.

About a mile beyond Myrtle Park we left the highway and followed a narrow, winding road until we came to a clearing at the top of a steep crest, and there before us, suddenly, was my white jewel house, the one I always wondered about from my perch in Myrtle Park. It looked different now, but I knew it had to be the same house. There could be no other like it in Mohawk, or in the entire county, or in the whole world. Drew pulled the bike over, let the engine die, and we just sat there looking at it, a mere hundred yards away.

Up close, it did not glisten the way it appeared to from across the highway, but the house was even more vast and impressive
than I had imagined. Its tall TV antenna caught the last ray of sunlight from behind the park, but everything else—the house itself and the surrounding lawn and woods were deepening purple, the highway below almost black.

“Gotta be twenty rooms in there,” Drew said, his voice unexpectedly loud. The only other sound was the faint whirr of the cars on the highway below, their headlights flickering in and out of the trees.

I couldn’t get over how strange it felt to be looking at the house up close, and even stranger to be in the company of Drew Littler. It was like learning that the girl you had a secret crush on for a very long time was also the object of somebody else’s affections. Somebody you doubted was worthy of her. “Let’s go,” I said. “We shouldn’t be up here. The sign said private road.”

My companion shrugged. “It’s a free country. Besides. This house is going to be mine someday.”

I must have made a sound, because he looked over his shoulder at me.

“You wait and see if it don’t.”

I shrugged.

It didn’t matter much if I wanted to go. Drew didn’t. So we sat there and stared at the house and the long sloping lawn. If I’d been there alone, it would have been okay, but I could not enjoy the house from the back of Drew Littler’s motorcycle. I felt like telling him that he was nuts to think he’d ever own a house like this one, any more than I would. It was dumb to kid himself. I didn’t say it, of course, but I was surprised to discover myself so blackly angry at his presumption. Did he imagine he was going to come into a fortune just because he could bench-press more than anybody in Mohawk, assuming he
could
bench more than anybody? The dancing blue vein on his broad forehead embodied his only skill as far as I could see. Did he actually see himself seated at the head of the long mahogany table (I imagined one like that in the rectory of Our Lady of Sorrows) in the rectangular dining room, shoveling mounds of white mashed potatoes onto the gleaming china?

“Come on,” I said. “They’ll be wondering where we are.”

“Your ass,” he said quietly. “They’ll be glad. Your old man is probably banging her right now.”

He was still staring at the house, but his expression had gone bad, as if he’d seen something nasty through one of the windows.

My own face must have borne a similar expression, because when Drew looked at me he said, “You didn’t know they go upstairs so he can crawl on top and put it to her?”

His voice was so full of contempt (for me, it seemed then) that I had to lie. “Sure,” I said.

He started up the engine. “Your ass, you did.”

A man came out of the jewel house and stood on the patio, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. If I hadn’t been thinking about my father and Eileen Littler, I might have been able to take pleasure in the fact that I knew the man’s name. He was Jack Ward, and he was standing there trying to figure out more ways to spend money. When Drew revved the engine, the man looked up and saw us, but I doubted the angry revving bothered him much.

Drew circled the bike once, then threw us back down toward the darkness of the highway below. “Fuck him!” he bellowed over the roar of the bike. “Fuck them all!”

On Saturday mornings I went to see my mother, and the few hours I spent at our old house were always the strangest of my week, which is saying a good deal when you lived with Sam Hall the rest of the time. To begin with, the house itself had changed, a fact I attributed to so little of it being lived in. The air downstairs seemed full of dust, millions of particles suspended in midair. No doubt this was largely the effect of the heavy curtains remaining closed, only one of two windows leaking a narrow slant of light in which the universe of atoms played. The kitchen was in the back of the house, and the maple darkened and obscured the yard with its lush foliage and allowed only late afternoon light to filter through the kitchen windows. I suspected, though I could not be certain, that the gray kitchen now represented the outer extremity of my mother’s world, and that she ventured down into it no more than once a day.

For a while I tried to convince myself that our arrangement was working and that, as she herself continued to insist, all she needed was a little time alone to draw things back together. She had waged her solitary war with the outside world too long. Only time would heal her wounds, restore her health. But I was gone only a month or so before I began to notice her face hollowing and the flesh along her upper arms growing slack. Like a cave-dweller,
her skin became sallow, then almost translucent, and when I mentioned that I didn’t think she was looking well, she responded that she didn’t think it would work out (my visiting on Saturday mornings) unless “we” could refrain from comments of that nature. It was hard enough for her to get well without somebody offering personal comments. It wasn’t much of a threat, of course. I don’t know who else would have cashed her meager checks, straightened out the mistakes made by her grocer, and purchased anything that required leaving the house.

As it turned out, my mother’s gradual physical decline was not the only proscribed subject between us. Since she never responded to any information I chose to impart about my father or our lives together, I gradually understood that I was not to communicate anything of that sort. Of course I knew enough not to tell her anything troubling. Even when she was in perfect health, she never had been the sort of person to whom you confessed riding motorcycles. But I soon discovered that even carefully selected anecdotes about my father, ones calculated (even fabricated) to suggest that our life together was normal and healthy, were deeply disturbing to her, and it took me a long time to realize that among the myriad torments my mother suffered alone in her room, having given me over to the dubious care of my father was the keenest and the most deeply rooted. Any reminder of his existence caused her eyes to go dull and dead, and she would look away, at the wall, at the drawn window shade, at nothing at all. I think that for the purposes of her day-to-day reality she had constructed some sort of fable to account for my absence. Probably I was supposed to be away at some posh private school, and therefore able to visit only on weekends. Whatever. I know she particularly liked hearing about my triumphs at school, and these I began to manufacture with some ingenuity. Rigid slavishness to the truth had never been one of my particular vices, and it was during this period that my mother’s and my relationship was entirely rewritten, grounded firmly in kind falsehoods. It would never change again. For the rest of our lives I would lie and she would believe me.

Once I got the hang of the fact that only lies gave her any measure of peace, I never told her the truth about anything again. I became a perfect son, creating what amounted to an alter ego for our own private edification, for I may as well confess that my lies were not completely altruistic, whether or not they had a
salubrious effect on my mother. The worse my actual performances at school, the more glorious the academic achievements I reported to her. The more arrogant and aloof I became with regard to everything that happened at Nathan Littler Junior High, the greater stature I accepted in the totally fraudulent renderings I concocted for her. First, I became a member of the eighth grade council, then class president. I also became a case study in morality, returning examinations to my instructors who, out of understandable force of habit, had given me a perfect score when in fact I had achieved a mere 98.