The Risk Pool (30 page)

Silence descended on the crowd. Even the red-haired man had interrupted his umpteenth account of the accident. The only sound was the faraway rumble of an approaching dump truck still two hundred yards up the highway.

And then suddenly it was over. Drew Littler dropped the metal bar and went to his knees, my father catching him as he pitched forward. Quickly, the troopers and ambulance attendants were scrambling up the hill, and I saw Eileen sit down on the asphalt. “He’s a crazyboy is what he is,” I heard the red-haired man say. “Thinks that murtercycle is a person.”

“The nut behind the wheel,” the big woman said, but the crowd had changed and the reference become elliptical. This time nobody laughed, and the big woman looked confused and hurt. She remembered how it was to be funny.

Only when the ambulances disappeared around the curve heading back toward Mohawk did I realize I’d been forgotten. The attendants had rolled Drew onto a stretcher and struggled with his dead weight down the incline to the waiting ambulances. I thought they did a pretty good job, dropping him just the once, and then not very hard. Drew was about as big as the two attendants put together. They placed him in the second ambulance, which had just that minute pulled in behind the first. Eileen rode in the back with her son and an attendant, my father up front with the driver. The woman who’d been driving the Impala had the other ambulance all to herself.

“Mother,” Tria Ward said, when the crowd began to disperse. “This is Ned Hall.”

I don’t know what surprised me more—that Tria Ward remembered my name or that she thought me worthy of introducing to her mother. Introductions were not part of my father’s normal
social routine. When we went someplace, he more or less assumed that people would know who we were, or if they didn’t, they ought to. When pressed on the subject, he’d admit that, yes, I was his, but there were a lot of people I knew pretty well who had no idea what my name was. Some others, like Wussy, got too much of a kick out of calling me Sam’s Kid to use my name anyway. Now, being introduced by my correct name to someone like Tria Ward’s mother had an odd effect on me. On the one hand it was flattering, like suddenly being granted personhood, but also a little unnerving, because I wasn’t certain I’d prove worthy. Would she divine after a few exchanges that I didn’t merit so specific an identity and ask her daughter, à la Mike at The Elms, what’s wrong with
him
?

“Hall,” Mrs. Ward repeated. “That is a common name, but not a local one.”

I did not know what to say to that. I had counted eleven Halls in the Mohawk directory once, but I felt this might be the wrong time to volunteer that information.

“That looked rather like a young man I used to know,” she said, pointing across the highway to the empty embankment where my father and Drew Littler had stood, as if she could still see them there. “His name was Samuel Hall, I believe.”

I admitted that someone named Samuel Hall was my father.

“He has not aged particularly well, has he?” Mrs. Ward said, as if she imagined that I might confirm her opinion by comparing the way I saw him now with her recollection of him as a younger man. “Of course, people live hard lives, don’t they.”

Clearly, from the tone of her voice, she counted herself among those who lived hard lives.

“Perhaps your young friend would like something cool to drink, dear,” Mrs. Ward speculated, settling on a phrase midway between an indefinite pronoun and a specific identity. The traffic had resumed on the highway now, the cars on the shoulder inching back into the stream, an occasional horn blaring.

There was nothing I would have liked better than “something cool” with Tria Ward, but her mother was giving me the willies, as did the fact that Tria herself had not uttered a syllable after saying my name. I thought perhaps this silence might be indicative of something. Perhaps good breeding required me to admit frankly at this juncture that I was not Tria Ward’s young friend, we’d met only once and then very briefly, that “something cool”
might better be saved for those who could lay better claim to the title of “young friend.” On the other hand, if I declined the invitation, I would have to admit to being stranded there on the highway. In a moment, my father’s would be the only car left on the shoulder, and for some reason I did not want to admit to either Tria Ward or her mother that I had been abandoned. Trotting on home would not have been such a big thing, of course, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it off with them watching. Surely, Mrs. Ward would say, in her strange, formal manner of speech, you don’t intend to
walk
all that way into town, along that fearfully busy highway. I accepted.

“Why don’t you have your young friend sit in the front with us, dear,” Mrs. Ward said. Jack Ward’s white Lincoln was sitting at the edge of the trees, and when Tria went around to the driver’s side, I followed her, failing to comprehend that she, not her mother, was going to drive. I think I may even have concluded, momentarily, that on extra-expensive big cars like this one, the steering mechanism was on the right.

“Tria is learning to drive, you see,” her mother said from the other side of the Lincoln, only the top half of her head visible above the roof. Her daughter, a slender inch taller, climbed up on top of two large pillows that allowed her to see over the dash. Then Mrs. Ward also got into the car.

That left me outside. I knew I had been invited to sit in the front seat, but it now appeared that all access to that front seat had been blocked. My problem, of course, was that I had mentally pictured the scene—Tria behind the wheel, I in the middle, close enough to admire the light brown hair along her slender arms, and the mother, since she insisted on intruding, riding shotgun. But with both of them already in the car, I didn’t see how it would be possible for me to assume my rightful station without crawling over one of them. Until Tria closed her door I believe I actually contemplated squeezing myself between her lovely self and the wheel, all the while muttering, excuse me, excuse me, just a moment, there we are. The fact that her mother’s door remained open finally clued me to the alternate seating arrangement I hadn’t imagined, and by the time I trotted around to the other side, Mrs. Ward had slid over next to her daughter, leaving me red-faced and despondent.

“I myself do not drive,” Tria’s mother was saying when I
ducked in and pulled the door shut. “So I am far from an ideal instructor. Her father is doing the real teaching, you see.”

I nodded, crestfallen. If Tria Ward was old enough for a learner’s permit, then she was probably two years older than I, though she did not look any fifteen. But hadn’t she told me that she too was entering the eighth grade? Had I misunderstood?

“I myself have never comprehended this nation’s ongoing fascination with the automobile. In this day and age, learning to drive is considered as necessary as learning to swim, though it certainly wasn’t in my day.”

“You don’t swim either, Mother,” Tria Ward observed. She held the big Lincoln in the very center of the narrow road and we inched up the incline at no more than ten miles an hour, a hazard, it seemed to me, to anyone coming down the road from the house, or up from the highway at a reasonable speed, since they would come upon us virtually parked there in the center of the pavement. Had a yellow line divided the road, we would have been impartially astraddle it. Tria gripped the steering wheel hard, seeming to pull it toward her, like the column of an airplane, as if attempting with all her strength to get the big Lincoln airborne while still in first gear.

“Water and your mother do not agree,” Mrs. Ward was saying, without explaining what the bone of contention between them might be.

Up through the trees we crept, all of us straining to see in the deepening dusk.

“My father drives a convertible,” I said, apropos of nothing other than a sudden need to plunge into the conversation and a vague desire to demonstrate my own familiarity with things automotive.

“A convertible automobile,” Mrs. Ward said, as if the concept required analysis. “I think, my dear, that headlights just might be the order of the day.”

This was true, of course, it being very dark among the tall trees, but I immediately wished the old woman had not suggested it, seeing the startled effect that this complication had on Tria. In order to turn on the headlights, she would have to remove one hand from the wheel, something she was apparently loath to do. Had she glanced at the dash she would have been able to locate the lights in half a second, but taking her eyes off the road at our current breakneck speed was unthinkable. So she was reduced to
fumbling for the lights with her left hand. To make matters worse, when her left hand came off the wheel, her right foot, for some reason, came off the accelerator, as if the two opposite limbs were controlled by the same invisible string. She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.

Suddenly, it was very quiet. The air-conditioning had gone off, and with it the radio, which had been playing softly. In their place we now had lights, and we all three watched the trees unaccountably climbing the hill before us. So were the ones out my side window. It was so quiet we could hear the sound of pebbles being ground beneath our wheels. We were adrift, backing down toward the highway at roughly the same speed we had climbed.

With neither power steering nor brakes, the car was suddenly foreign to Tria. She tried everything she could think of, but nothing worked. She gave the Lincoln more gas, naturally, to no effect. The key in the ignition was frozen, the steering wheel locked, and her legs too short to press down hard on the brakes. With a look of pure terror, she turned to her mother and said something that surprised me more than anything that had happened so far—“I love you, Mother!” she said.

Mrs. Ward turned to face her daughter with an expression that bespoke astonishment, fear, and sincerity in equal parts, as if both mother and daughter had been signaled unambiguously that the end of the world was near. “Why, I love you too, dear,” she said.

We left the Lincoln right there, its rear end well off the pavement, its long front sticking way out onto the roadway. God, it was a big car.

Tears tracked down Tria Ward’s cheeks as the three of us made our way up through the corridor of dark trees. She made no sound though. There was nothing wrong with the car, except that the engine was flooded from her attempts to accelerate up the hill after it had stalled.

Unfortunately, my own driving skills were limited to what I had already done. You couldn’t very well be Sam Hall’s kid without knowing what to do about a rolling car. About once a month my
father would park on an incline, put the car in neutral, and get out to talk to somebody. If I happened to be in the car, I’d just lean over and throw it into park when it started to roll. If not, he’d usually catch up to the convertible before it got too far. We changed the convertible’s broken rear reflectors every few weeks and drove blithely away from the fender benders and cracked headlights of unlucky adjacent automobiles. So, when I saw that Jack Ward’s big white Lincoln was about to bear us back into the trees, I knew what to do.

What I didn’t know was whether I was permitted to do it. I mean, I wasn’t driving, and it wasn’t my car, and I hardly knew these people. I could imagine Tria and her mother deeply resentful of my impertinence if I were to just ignore the chain of command by leaning across and slamming the Lincoln to a rocking halt without permission. And, too, there was something a little unnerving about the two of them turning to each other and professing their love at that precise moment, as if doing so might have some sort of incantatory effect on the vehicle. So I didn’t do anything until we got up a pretty decent head of silent steam and I heard the back wheels on the soft shoulder. By that time, putting the car in park had about the same effect as slamming into a tree, which we would have done in another three feet. For a moment we all just sat there, our back wheels well below the road, the front ones on the outer edge of the shoulder in launch position, looking at patches of dusky blue through the treetops.

“We’d made it
very
near the top, you see,” Mrs. Ward said to her quietly weeping daughter, as if reasonable people hadn’t any right to anticipate a better result, really, since very few automobiles ever made it the entire way. She pointed toward the house, just now visible through the trees ahead, to illustrate her point. “And we were
very
fortunate to have your quick-thinking young friend in our midst.”

Somehow I didn’t feel like I was “in their midst,” though I was certainly tagging along all right, and quite happily too, thoroughly full of myself, utterly content to consider that I
had
saved the day, and only vaguely troubled to recollect that when I had finally lunged across the big Lincoln’s front seat to throw the car in park, I had planted my left hand, for leverage, squarely in Mrs. Ward’s crotch.

“And the car is totally without damage, you see, so there is no reason for concern or alarm on the part of anyone.”

I was unclear whether this last was to reassure her daughter or to anticipate an unfair response on the part of Jack Ward, who, at that precise moment, appeared on the patio and discovered us, three abreast, entering between the stone pillars at the far end of the oblong drive. He came toward us at a strange gait, as if he wanted to run, but knew he wasn’t supposed to. With all due respect to Mrs. Ward’s confidently uninformed opinion, I doubted the Lincoln was undamaged, at least if the grinding, then thunking noise it made when forced into park was any indication, but it
had
come to rest without hitting anything, and that, anyway, was a blessing.

“What’s wrong? Where’s the car?” Jack Ward wanted to know when he was close enough to inquire. He looked at us each in turn, spending a little more time with me, since my presence posed a second riddle he plainly hoped was unrelated to the first. Surely his wife and daughter hadn’t traded in a new car on a used boy?