The Risk Pool (22 page)

“She’s a good girl, though,” my father was saying. I didn’t have to turn my head to know that he was looking at me. When we pulled up into the driveway, he let me look up into the dark woods of Myrtle Park for a minute before delivering the cuff to the back of my head that I was waiting for.

“Stop crying,” he said.

I did. I wasn’t, really, to begin with. Just scared I might start.

“What’s the matter?”

I said nothing was the matter.

“I’m not going to marry her, if that’s what’s eating you.”

It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn’t much better.

“You can if you want,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said.

In the distance we heard the sound of a motorcycle approaching, and my father shook his head. “I’d cry too, if I thought I’d end up with Zero for a brother.”

We got out of the car.

“Smile,” he said. “And smooth your hair down.” It always stood up where he cuffed me. “You look like the village idiot.”

There wasn’t much danger of my being mistaken for the village idiot with Drew Littler around. When the motorcycle fishtailed into the drive, its rider was so bundled against the cold that it could have been anybody. Anybody crazy enough to ride a bike in February with the temperature in the twenties. It hadn’t snowed in several days and the streets were dry, but the sloping dirt drive was spotted with patches of ice that had been a problem even for our car, which was now blocking the open garage, tall snowbanks close on both sides.

The boy throttled down and waited on the rumbling cycle. My
father made no move to get back in the car. Instead, he began to unload the groceries from the backseat, balancing the first bag precariously on the slanted hood. Drew Littler gunned the engine once for emphasis, then raised his goggles. “You want to move that trash heap?”

My father ignored him, handing me one of the bags of groceries. We went around and in through the back, leaving him at the foot of the drive, gunning his engine.

Eileen was waiting for us inside. “Move your car,” she told my father. Her voice had a sharp blade on the end of it.

“Okay,” my father said. “Mind if I set these down first? You figure His Royal Highness can wait that long?”

We put the bags of groceries on the dinette. Just in time, in my case, because the blood had weakened the paper and the roasts were threatening to plunge through. My hand and wrist were red and dripping.

My father started to unload meat.

“The car, Sam,” Eileen said, elbowing him out of the way. “You’re dripping blood on my floor. I just mopped it.”

“Sorry,” my father said, as if he wasn’t, particularly.

Outside, the motorcycle’s engine roared to life, and I heard a patch of rubber being laid on the street below. At first, I thought Drew had decided to ride off someplace, but then I saw his head flash by the dining room window heading up the drive. Immediately following, there was a dull thud; the engine coughed once and died.

My father dried his hands on a paper towel and peered out the kitchen window, shaking his head in disbelief.

I followed Eileen outside. The motorcycle was angled crazily, deep in the snowbank next to our car, its front wheel unaccountably up in the air. Drew had apparently tried to blast through the snow. The hard-packed part at the edge of the pavement had accepted the weight of the bike, but then the cycle had sunk seat-deep. Drew was still on it, looking like an astronaut awaiting launch. He got off reluctantly, himself sinking thigh-deep in the snow.

“Terrific,” Eileen said.

“Tell your friend,” her son said.

My father came out, still drying his hands on the towel. “I never would have thought to park it there, Zero.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“Let me get this out of your way,” my father said, indicating our car.

“Screw that rust bucket. Give me a hand with the chopper.”

“What,” my father said. “A big strong guy like you? Just lift it right out.”

“You think
you
could?”

“Not me,” my father admitted. “But then I wouldn’t have put it there to begin with.”

“Quit acting like children, the two of you,” Eileen said. “Help him, will you.”

But my father was having too good a time. He might help, eventually. But not yet. “What good is it to lift weights all day if you can’t pick your own bike out of a snowbank?” he wanted to know.

“Screw yourself then,” Drew said. “I’ll settle with you later.”

“Wait about twenty years is my advice. And even then I’d be careful.”

Then he nudged me in the shoulder hard enough to make me take one step forward. “Go help Dumbbell,” he said. “Take the heavy end.”

Drew snorted at the suggestion that I might be able to help, and even Eileen smiled, as if the one thing the three of them could agree on was that I was the weakling of the group. I flushed angrily at that and without thinking climbed the snowbank and positioned myself next to the bike. Grabbing the seat with both hands, I pulled hard, actually imagining the cycle would come free of the snow, which had already begun to freeze around the back wheel. Instead, I found myself seated in the snow, my feet having gone out from under me, which everybody thought was pretty funny.

When I followed Eileen and my father back into the house, leaving Drew to shovel the snow away from his half-buried bike, I was full of hatred so black that I can still taste it now, almost twenty-five years later. When I had fallen, one leg had gone under the bike and my groin had come in violent contact with the rear tire, sending waves of nausea over me like surf. At that moment, I hated them all blackly—my father, Eileen and Drew Littler, everybody. Even my poor mother, who lay wasting toward oblivion in a big strange bed in Schenectady. In the cold agony of
surging pain and humiliation, I would have been content to consign them all to everlasting perdition. I’d have watched the flames licking them with perfect equanimity.

“Do a roast,” my father suggested.

It was Eileen’s turn to sling the unoffending meat this time, and that’s what she was doing, bouncing packages off the sides of her freezer. Altercations between my father and Drew always infuriated her, but my guess was that there was more to it in this instance. She’d been ready to take my father on when he walked in the door. The episode with the cycle had distracted her, but now she had remembered whatever it was that had angered her before. My father looked like he knew what was on her mind and wished he didn’t. He probably figured that getting her to cook a roast would have a calming effect. You couldn’t cook a roast and stay mad at the person who bought it, may have been his thinking. And that’s probably why she wasn’t having any part of our carnivore peace offering. The set of her jaw had my father looking like a scolded dog, an effect my mother had never been able to achieve. He had always fought with her the way you would with a man, stopping only at the very brink of physical violence. He never treated her with the sort of care you use with something you considered fragile. And that’s what struck me at the time, because Eileen was the one who looked sturdy. In fact, when I saw that dark look on her face as she slung roasts against the back wall of the freezer, it scared me, and I remember wondering if maybe it didn’t scare my father too.

But I don’t think so. I think he saw something I couldn’t see back then, and his expression was a little like the one he’d worn the afternoon we’d gone in to tell my mother I was going to live with him. It was as if when he looked at Eileen, he saw my mother the way she’d been that day, so broken inside that she couldn’t stop shaking.

“A roast would take two hours,” Eileen said.

“So?”

“So it’s six now. So I don’t feel like doing dishes at ten o’clock. So.”

“So don’t. I’ll do them.”

“My house. My dishes,” she said. The freezer was full now, and when she tried to slam the door by way of punctuation, it just
swung back at her. The second time she put her weight behind it until the whole refrigerator rose up an inch or two off the linoleum.

“You want to go out someplace?”

“Sure,” she said. “Why not? You’re done baiting my son. Let’s go out to eat someplace nice. Like where I work, maybe. While we’re there, you can threaten my boss, maybe.”

“I wasn’t baiting him,” my father said. Only the first part of her complaint had registered. “He could have waited until we unloaded the groceries, in as much as he’s the one who’s going to eat them.”

“Somehow I got the idea
you
were here for dinner.”

“Not if you don’t want us,” he said, looking even more hangdog.

The “us” made my presence official, and they both looked at me for arbitration. I would have flushed if the recent blow to my groin hadn’t drained all the blood from my face.

“Ned can stay,” she said. “At least he’s no troublemaker.”

“Neither am I. I just brought you some groceries. If I’d known that would upset you …”

The television was on in the next room, so I went in there and sat down on the sofa, glad to be alone. Eileen always kept the room dark—because it was so ugly, she said—the only light emanating from the television screen. In this relative privacy I slipped a hand into my trousers to check myself out. The year before, a boy in my class who had been picking his nose on third base had taken a line drive in the crotch and he had swelled up sufficiently to require special underwear. I hadn’t actually seen him in this swollen condition, but I’d heard the matter discussed in the locker room before gym and a boy had lifted his own member to remind us of the size of a normal testicle, this compared to the big fist he put next to it. Going strictly on feel, mine still seemed about their usual size, but I couldn’t be sure.

By cracking the blinds, I could watch Drew from the sofa, though it had grown dark outside. He too seemed to have lost the edge of his anger. He had shoveled all around the bike, leaving it a shiny island. He was now engaged in carving out some of the snow beneath the cycle so that he could plant his feet and gain some purchase. After a few minutes the bike was mostly free, though still magically reared up, frozen in place. Tossing the shovel aside, he stood before it, blowing on his hands, seemingly lost in thought.

I’d spotted for him enough when he benched in the garage to know what he was doing. He was collecting himself, preparing. Breathing. Swelling his muscles, as if in a mirror. Studying his own steamy breath, feeling the power surging in his body until he was certain it was equal to the weight of the bike. I watched with genuine anticipation when he finally bent to the task, knowing that he intended more than simply dislodging the bike and rolling it forward into the garage. My father’s taunts were eating at him, and I didn’t need to see his broad forehead to know that the blue vein was pulsing there. I could visualize his expression, too, his contempt for whatever he was up against. He put one red hand under the seat, the other in the crotch beneath the frame and above the wheel, holding his squat position perfectly for a second before throwing himself back and up, his knees and arms straightening without quite locking. The bike stayed stuck for a second, then gave with an audible crack.

He nearly lost his balance then, but somehow righted himself, still refusing to set the bike down. For a moment I thought he actually intended to clean and jerk it, but instead he turned with it, still held chest-high, 180 degrees and stepped with it over the snowbank. The rear wheel of the cycle caught the antenna of my father’s car and snapped it like a twig.

A moment later he emerged from the dark garage and came toward the house. On the way he stopped and picked up the busted antenna, used the palm of his hand to reduce its length, then his thumb and forefinger to stretch it full again, whereupon he cocked his arm and whistled the antenna out over the top of the garage, deep into the black trees.

In relating what follows I must confess to a certain chronological vagueness. The events themselves I can see in sharp focus, and I want to think they happened that same evening, and there are good reasons to suppose they did. In a narrative sense they present a nice neat package, effect dutifully tripping along at the heels of cause. Perhaps it is the attraction of such simplicity that makes me suspicious; that along with the conviction that real life seldom works this way.

The events which follow may have been the culmination of many meals eaten in the Littler kitchen, the four of us cramped into the nook where their dinette was stationed, walled in on
three sides. Eileen herself always insisted on the seat at the free end so she could get up and grab the coffee pot or pour drinks. Drew, my father, and I would all be penned in once the meal began, unable to push our chairs back more than an inch or two. I think I was the only one who felt the terrible restriction, since Drew had no intention of getting up as long as he had his mother to fetch for him. My father seemed to enjoy tight places, always spurning the empty end of the counter at the Mohawk Grill in favor of the end jammed with people and stacks of dirty dishes.

Once we were seated around Eileen’s table it was impossible to stand up without pushing the table forward and pinioning whoever was opposite against the wall, and I think Eileen took solace from the fact that if she could just get my father and her son seated they could rise in anger only with supreme difficulty. Nobody needed worry about me rising in anger, but I couldn’t have, regardless. Being the smallest by several degrees I got the narrowest seat, opposite Eileen herself, hemmed in by a wall behind, my father and Drew on either side, the table in front. I always relieved myself before dinner began.

The little dinette itself was always crowded beyond belief. Condiments that did not require refrigeration were always left in the center of the table and these were joined, half an hour before mealtime, by cold jars of every description. Drew devoured pickles—sweet, dill, bread and butter, kosher—while my father ate olives—green ones, bulbous purples, shriveled blacks. Their tall, slender jars he would probe thoughtfully with his black forefinger, extracting the fruit expertly, even from the bottom of the tallest jars without the aid of a utensil. To this day, I cannot contemplate an olive, even when attractively displayed, say, on a silver relish dish, without seeing my father’s finger worming around the jar in search of the last elusive marble afloat in its own murky juices. Drew was equally disgusting in his personal search for pickles, which I too was inordinately fond of. But unless I could spear the first slice out of a fresh jar, before the contents became polluted, I abstained.