The Risk Pool (27 page)

Fortunately, my humiliation was of major significance to me alone. I eventually discovered something like my normal voice, and I think Tria Ward and I had something like a conversation. We must have, because I came away from it knowing that she presently went to school at St. Francis, though she had attended a private school in Schenectady before that, both of which circumstances explained why I had never seen her around. Like me, she was entering the eighth grade in the fall, and she said she was trying to talk her mother into letting her go to Mohawk High the following year, though she thought she’d probably end up at Bishop McGuin in Amsterdam, or maybe this school in Connecticut.

I think we were both more than a little conscious of the adult conversation that was going on next to us. Listening in on adults was a habit I’d picked up very young, and I remember suspecting that Tria Ward was the same way, that she was eavesdropping on her father even more intently than I on mine, as if she hoped to learn the answer to some urgent question, one she’d have just asked if she hadn’t known she wasn’t supposed to.

My father was still needling Jack Ward about leading the good life.

“We both know what the good life is, Sam,” Jack Ward said, his voice low and confidential. “The good life is not being shot at. Money. The rest of it. All fine and dandy. But not waking up in the Hürtgen Forest, hemorrhoids all adangle, no feeling in your feet—that’s the good life.”

“They didn’t kill us, anyway,” my father said.

“No, but they tried like bloody hell, and I got awful tired of it.”

“We were trying, too.”

“Not me,” Jack Ward said. “I honestly couldn’t say for sure I killed anybody. I just ducked, got off a round or two, tried not to hit any of our guys, prayed like a schoolgirl. You never prayed, did you.”

“Never once,” my father said.

“You wouldn’t shit me,” Jack Ward said.

“We all prayed,” Mike said.

“Never once,” my father insisted.

Jack Ward smiled. “I never stopped till we passed Staten Island.”

“You stopped then though, I bet.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I made about a hundred deals with God over there and never honored one.”

My father shrugged. “If he’s half as smart as the preachers say, he knew you wouldn’t.”

“We never shook on them, is the way I look at it.”

Mike was looking pale and nervous, as if he expected lightning. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” he said. “Don’t let Irma hear you.”

“I got God covered anyhow,” Jack Ward said. “This one claims she’s going to be a nun, and her mother’s practically one already. I get prayed for all the time.”

“For all the good it does,” Mike observed.

That reminded my father of a joke, which he told at excruciating length. It was about a guy who was constipated and went to half a dozen doctors. Nobody could help. Finally, the last doctor prescribed a powerful enema, which the man took home with him, but he was back the next day complaining of even greater discomfort. When the doctor expressed surprise that the enema had had no effect, the patient snorted, saying he might as well have shoved them up his ass for all the good they did. In place of the word “ass,” my father substituted a humming sound, turning his back on Tria and me for the finale. I already knew the punch line (it was one of the eight or ten jokes my father told regularly) and so I watched for Tria’s Ward’s reaction to it, expecting disgust. Instead, her expression registered something like fear, as if somebody had once warned her that the world was a foul, vulgar place, though this was the first concrete evidence that it might be true. I felt very sorry for her, and if I could have thought of a way, I would have tried to convince her that the world was neither foul nor vulgar, the painful erection in my chinos notwithstanding.

All that night I thought about Tria Ward. After her father took her away, into the dining room, my father and I left for a dinner of hamburg steaks at the Mohawk Grill, and there he finally got me to talk a little about my mother. What the hell, he said, he’d even sign F. William Peterson’s papers if I wanted him to. He just hated like hell to be taken for a ride, that’s all. Then he launched into a familiar diatribe about lawyers in general and F. William Peterson in particular, concluding that F. Willie was no prize, far from it, but he wasn’t as bad as most.

As I listened to him talk and looked around the diner, which we had to ourselves this late on a Sunday evening, except for Harry and Wild Bill Gaffney, the town idiot, whom Harry looked after sometimes. Everything looked shabby, somehow. Shabbier than usual. And when Wild Bill used his index finger to scour the last drop of dirty coffee from the bottom of his cup, I wanted to cry.
I was sensible enough to be embarrassed about feeling this way, for here I was, warm and decently dressed, with a plate full of fries dripping brown gravy in front of me, with over three hundred dollars in the bank that nobody knew anything about. My mother was not dead, as I had imagined twenty-four hours earlier, and for all I knew she might even draw her mind back out of the dark woods that attracted her and come home. In general, things were looking up, but for some reason I’d never felt lower, and when my father said he thought maybe he’d go out for a while, I was glad to have the rest of the night to myself.

We ambled across the deserted Main Street, hands in our pockets, and up the stairs to our dark flat. I got undressed right away and pretended to read, so my father wouldn’t stay around the apartment any longer than he wanted to, about five minutes, as it turned out. Then he was gone, the convertible jerking away from the curb below, back toward The Elms to torment Irma and wait for Eileen to get off work. Harry came out of the diner below, Wild Bill shuffling behind him, and locked the front door, officially surrendering downtown Mohawk to ghosts. The Mohawk Theater, three doors down from the grill, had closed after Christmas, its dark marquee still insisting
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, A CLASSIC
. The theater was the fourth business on Main to fail that year, though two of the others had reopened on the new highway that skirted town. Looming up behind Main Street was the dark top floor of the junior high, and behind it the yellow windows of the hospital perched atop the treacherous Hospital Hill. Beyond it, the vast expanse of Myrtle Park, its unlit winding trails too spooky to visit at night. I’d read about a place in Arizona called the Superstition Mountains where people had a habit of disappearing without a trace, and it occurred to me that you could disappear without a trace right here in Mohawk and that I probably would, eventually.

On the other side of the park and the new highway, out beyond the city limits, was Tria Ward, and I thought about her and the scared look on her face when my father told the joke about the constipated man. Had her father recognized me as one of the boys who sat on the motorcycle at the end of his drive? Probably not. Probably it didn’t matter. The Wards were all safe inside the white jewel house. Safe from the lunatic Drew Littlers of Mohawk County, safe from boys like me who might be tempted to fall in love with their dark-eyed, convent-bound girl child.

Somewhere in the gray consciousness of half sleep, though, my mind skittered away from beautiful Tria Ward and resolved a riddle that had been in the back of my mind all day. At the nursing home, I’d been asked to sign a big visitor’s ledger. There had been a page for each resident, and I had expected my mother’s to be clean. Instead, one illegible scrawl was entered there again and again, at least fifteen or twenty times. I had given it little thought, because it looked like the kind of scratching a doctor might be guilty of. Who else was there?

When I started awake, though, that signature seemed written in the air above my bed, and before the scrawl could disappear I was able to decipher it: F. William Peterson, it said.

When school got out for the summer, I had a lot more time on my hands, what with my father working on the road every day. Mornings I liked to spend at the Mohawk Free Library, an old stone building with a nice circular dome you could stand beneath and look up into. In the big archways just above the second floor were stained glass windows, and in the mornings the sun streamed through the eastern ones giving the stacks below a churchlike atmosphere, though the tall narrow windows along the first floor reduced the effect with a more natural light. All of the books were on the first floor, which also housed the loan desk, the children’s room, and the general reading room, where a few white-haired men gathered to talk loudly every morning over the
Schenectady Gazette
, which filled them in on events ignored by the
Mohawk Republican
. These were fierce, belligerent old men who wouldn’t stand for any shushing, and the librarians ignored the occasional complaint lodged against them, though an identical
QUIET PLEASE
sign posted in the children’s room was strictly enforced.

The library itself was oddly shaped, as if the architect had followed the curve of the land, ducking around boulders and trees rather than removing them. Even the rows of shelves inside meandered, each a different length and height, sometimes stopping abruptly to accommodate a floor register or green pipe jutting out of the wall. My favorite place was a tiny, out-of-the-way alcove where a small oak desk and chair had been placed, one of half a dozen such scattered throughout the stacks. There I could take off my shoes and rest my bare feet on the cool slate floor and read for hours, uninterrupted by the low, confidential whispers of the librarians at the nearby circulation desk, the whirring of the large rotating fan near the front door, the distant barking of the old men in the reading room. If there was a new librarian, she might come check on me, suspicious of a disappearing teenager (I’d proudly turned thirteen that May and was worthy of the accolade), but the rest of the staff knew me, expected me, ignored me.

They never even minded when I opened the little unscreened window in the alcove, which provided a nice breeze until midday, just enough to lift the pages of whatever I happened to be reading. Until noon, even on the hottest days, my alcove was the coolest place in town. After that, the whole library became close and hot, and by midafternoon even the rotating fan did little to disturb the dead, heavy air. Both I and the bickering old men were gone by then, leaving one or two librarians there all by themselves until six when the library closed.

I read some good books that summer, along with a great many bad ones, and I liked them all. Off in my own retreat and my own world, I learned some important things. Sometimes I would take any book off any shelf and start reading, as much as twenty or thirty pages without understanding so much as a word, or imagining I didn’t, only to discover that if I came back to the same book and passage a few weeks later what it said would make sense and I’d realize I’d understood more than I thought. If I was feeling energetic, I’d look up words I didn’t know, but more often I’d be content to wait for the word to crop up again in another context, and by its second or third appearance I’d know what it meant. I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.

Around noon, or shortly thereafter, I’d hop on my bike and
head over to the diner, where lots of times there would be something going on. The place would get busy and Harry would let me wash dishes for an hour or so, then feed me. On Friday he’d slip me a five or ten, depending on how much I’d worked and eaten. He had a good mind for figuring out what I had coming. I saw lots of people I knew. Untemeyer was in between two-thirty and three, a dead time when Harry didn’t mind him sitting at the end of the counter and taking some action. Having him was good for business then, because the men who wandered in off the street to get a number down probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and sometimes they’d stay for coffee or a piece of pie if they thought it hadn’t been sitting in the case too long. Tree came in all the time too, though he never spoke to me unless I was with my father. My guess was he didn’t recognize me otherwise. According to my father, Tree still had the two biggest, ugliest women in Mohawk County on the line, and when I asked him if he was counting Irma, Mike’s wife, he said he was counting everybody. “You should see
Tree’s
wife,” my father said, but he wouldn’t go into detail. Less frequently, my old friend Wussy would amble in wearing the same formless fishing hat, alight with colorful, hand-tied flies, which he would detach and let me examine, especially if my father was around. He always made a big deal about not letting my father touch his tackle, claiming he couldn’t afford to waste hours tying a fly if all it was going to hook was Sam Hall’s ugly black thumb. Wussy must have done something besides fish, but I never knew what it was. During the spring and summer he sold trout he caught to the Holiday Inn out on the highway, along with one or two other local restaurants. Sometimes, if he had a good catch, he’d have a half a dozen smaller ones left over and give them to Harry, who’d grill them if you asked. “Five-fifty up at the Holiday,” Harry grumbled every time he served one of Wussy’s trout. For some reason Harry always viewed the Holiday Inn as his chief competition for the Mohawk restaurant dollar, and he could never see why people would spend the extra to go there. When they’d opened a year ago, he’d given them six months to go belly up. “Same friggin’ trout,” he insisted.

“They got backs on the chairs there,” my father explained from his stool at the counter. “You can lean back without falling on your ass.”

Harry snorted. “Give me the extra three bucks and I’ll stand behind you.”

“I could never be sure you wouldn’t let me go right to the deck.”

“That’s true,” Harry admitted.

“You ever think your business might improve if you worked on your personality?” said a man named John, one of the regulars I didn’t like.

“I do all right,” Harry barked. “I do all fuckin’ right.”

“And you only work eighty hours a week,” John said.

“What would I do in this fuckin’ town if I wasn’t working?” Harry wanted to know. “Go to the track. Chase married women. Fall off bar stools?”