The Risk Pool (32 page)

Within a few weeks I was doing so well with this new enterprise that I could afford to cut in an associate, though I wouldn’t have
done this had I not been scared into it. The bottom of the pond was spooky enough, even under normal circumstances. Skimming among the weeds, my mask mere inches from the inky bottom, my fins stirring up black muck behind me, I didn’t depend on sight that much because experience taught me where the balls congregated, the result of trajectory and the subtleties of underwater physics. A blind kid could have gathered them, which was good, because that was what I was in the parts of the pond nearest the bank where the grass grew tall and the long shadows of the trees bordering the fairways darkened the surface. I quickly became a proficient snorkeler, able to stay down over a minute at a time, then rising gently, just the snorkel itself breaking the smooth surface of the pond, releasing the rubber ball to let the air in. Inevitably, some of the pond’s brackish water got into the tube, but I learned to expel it without swallowing too much. Its taste was vile all the same and the duration of my scavenging was determined as much by my ability to endure that sour taste as by false or fading light or fear of discovery.

One evening, my net heavy with my dimpled catch, I became conscious of having stayed in the pond longer than usual. One of the things I worried about was forgetting about the time and coming up out of the pond to pitch darkness, disoriented and unable to locate my bike, which I always hid in the woods. Twice I had nearly lingered too long and had located my gear by pure chance in the darkness. The days were getting shorter now, and I was suddenly certain that I had stayed in the pond too long and that when I broke the surface it would be into an even darker darkness. When I pushed hard toward the surface, my snorkel was suddenly jammed down and wrenched out of my mouth, as if by a large hand. Almost simultaneously my head rammed something so hard and unyielding that it sent shivers of pain to the base of my neck and shoulders. The shock drove the air from my straining lungs in an explosion of frantic bubbles.

My first conclusion was that I had somehow become confused about which direction was up, that I had propelled myself into the bank of the pond. This did not square with the direction my escaping air bubbles were taking, however, which was the same direction I had tried to go. Surely
they
knew which direction was up. How was it, then, that the ground came to be above me? There could be no doubt that it was the ground, especially after
my second desperate lunge, this time with my arms extended before me, my hands encountering a solid wall of dense clay. At that moment it seemed that there was only one certainty in the entire world—that I was about to die. Somehow, I had become the victim of the cruelest hoax ever played on mortal man. Each direction I turned I encountered that smooth hard clay which became for me that instant “down.” There simply was no “up,” and up was the only direction that would do me any good. And though it seems odd now that it should have occurred to me at the time, I remember distinctly the terrible feeling that I had been in precisely the same situation before, that first week after going to live with my father when I’d been trapped in the basement beneath Klein’s. Then too my first reaction had been surprise, then panic, then an attempt at calm rationality. There had to be a button that would open the elevator door. To admit that maybe there wasn’t was to admit the possibility of an irrational universe.

But in the basement of Klein’s I had been able to breathe and with each terrified breath assure myself that though I could see no way out, in time I would be rescued. Now I had neither time nor air, and so of course I would die. And it would be my fault. Because even though everything had suddenly become irrational, there was a dark shape, a message even, to its insanity. I was about to die because I had not learned my lesson. I had gotten myself into another dark place, and this time no door would open, my father would not appear, no hand would yank me into light and air for the simple reason that there
was no up
. At least not for me.

And the truth is that if I’d had to figure it out in order to survive, I would have died there in that narrow black cave beneath the bank of the pond. I hadn’t the presence of mind to solve the riddle, to see that if I’d swum into a situation where there was no up that the only solution was to
back
out. When forward, right, left, up, and down all yielded the same result, I simply gave up, shoving in blind rage against the earth before me, furious with it even as I surrendered to it. I stopped kicking with my fins, accepted the brackish water into my lungs and felt gentle sleep coming.

Then, miraculously, I was on the surface, my arms thrashing in the air, clawing, without any instruction from me, at the grassy bank. My last angry shove against mother earth, combined with
my surrender and the end to my frantic webb-footed kicking, had floated me back out of the cave and into the world.

I was alive.

Willie Heinz was the first person I tapped to act as sentinel, though he didn’t work out. For one thing, he was easily abstracted, and for another he was extremely stupid. Once I disappeared beneath the surface of the water, he forgot about me as completely as if I had never existed. While I was under, he amused himself by stoning jays that screamed obscenities down at us from the innermost branches of the dark fairway trees. Sometimes when I surfaced I’d see him tearing ass down the cart path throwing stones up into the dark limbs as fast as he could pick them up. He took all feathered insults with vicious good cheer, like a taunt from a friend on the other side of the schoolyard fence, and bore down on the offending chatterers with murderous, though wildly inaccurate, intent. The other obvious problem with Willie Heinz as a lookout was that he couldn’t swim, which meant that if I managed to get myself in trouble I was still on my own.

His uselessness notwithstanding, I’d have been happy enough for his vague, distant company if he’d done no worse than stone jays. In the end though, we couldn’t agree on how to run the business. Willie Heinz was of the opinion that swimming in muck after lost golf balls was foolish when there were so many perfectly good ones right out there in the middle of the fairway. They sat right up in the dry grass and the people they belonged to were often two hundred yards away. Willie advocated allowing a foursome to hit, then collecting their drives while the players were still bagging their drivers and ribbing each other on the tee. There were several holes with doglegs and hills that provided excellent cover. You could dash out in the middle of the fairway, collect all four balls, and be back in the trees before a single pale blue golf hat appeared on the horizon. It was astonishing how long people would search up and down a wide open fairway, how willing they were to believe that all four shots had simply disappeared.

I tried my best to reason with him, to explain that this outright theft was ultimately bad for business, that the men in the shiny cars who pulled over to buy water balls from us on Saturday
mornings would not hesitate to turn us in if they ever suspected that they were buying fairway balls hit straight and true, but I could never get him to see it. What it came down to was my personal belief that the men in the pale blue hats should pay for their failures, whereas Willie Heinz perversely expected them to pay for their successes, a more radical philosophical position, the ramifications of which were scary to anybody who hadn’t entirely given up on the possibility of the odd success in life.

So, much as I hated to, I had to let Willie go. And just in time, as it turned out. He was in business for himself only a few days when he fell victim to a classic error in judgment. Spying a party on the distant tee, he had positioned himself on the far side of a hill that all the players had to drive past and awaited their offerings. The first three hitters whistled shots out into the middle of the fairway within thirty or forty yards of each other. Patiently, Willie awaited the fourth crack of the driver, his signal to gather. When it didn’t come immediately, he did not alarm himself. The worst player in any foursome would be hitting last and often these took forever addressing the ball. He should have taken alarm though, because the party on the tee had just become a threesome after one of their number had proven too drunk to continue after a long lunch in the clubhouse at the end of the front nine. The remaining members of the foursome came over the hill not on foot but in two carts, both barreling flat-out in a race. When they cleared the rim of the hill the driver of the lead cart saw Willie Heinz in time to swerve, but the second, in the wake of the first and a tad slower for carrying two men, ran right over the boy as he struggled to his feet. The impact propelled one rider out of the cart. He inscribed a clean perfect arc and landed unhurt on his haunches in the fairway. The driver of the second cart was also pitched clear, leaving Willie alone with the vehicle, or rather pinioned underneath it. The paper bag he’d been using to collect balls had ruptured on impact and they now lay fanned out over the hill. “Motherfucker!” Willie Heinz bellowed from beneath the golf cart. “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker!”

Claude wasn’t much of an improvement, though he was as faithful to me as any mutt you’d ever save from starvation. At his mother’s insistence, he wore turtleneck sweaters to hide the white scars left by the rope. Not that Claude wasn’t amenable. Since the afternoon he’d strung himself up from the ramada, he’d become amenable to everything. Mostly he just sat in front of the
television, staring at it blankly, except for Ben Cartwright and
Bonanza
, which struck some kind of chord within him and sometimes made him cry. Otherwise, he did whatever his mother told him. If I came over to visit, he’d follow me out the door and down the street. In the old days, the first thing he would have done was trip me, or shove me in a snowbank, or declare a race after getting a good four-step running lead. Now he just heeled to my command, abstracted, vague about whatever was on our (my) agenda.

The only thing that ever attracted his attention was a blue Thunderbird. Whenever he saw one, Claude would want to follow or, if it was parked, wait beside it. His father had bought a new one to replace the Pontiac station wagon just before his son’s attempted suicide and taken it with him when he abandoned them a week or so after the doctors assured him and Mrs. Schwartz that their son would live. It was a terrible irony that blue Thunderbirds were popular that year. I knew of at least three owned by people in Mohawk, and I always had a devil of a time convincing Claude when he spotted one parked that he shouldn’t wait there by the curb for his father to come out.

Actually, Claude wasn’t that bad a sentinel. He stationed himself on the fairway edge of the pond where he could see well in both directions. When anyone approached the tee, he clapped two flat rocks together underwater, an unmistakable, sometimes earsplitting signal. Now and then he’d give the signal if he just got lonesome for me, or lost track of my bubbles, or thought I’d been down too long. He always looked enormously relieved when I surfaced, as if he suspected that I had been visiting the same dark place he had visited at the end of his rope. I think I may have been the only person he told about it, what it had felt like. It was spooky listening to him explain in half a dozen words with that hoarse whisper his voice had become. For some reason, I had not imagined that he had gone blind there, but he said he had, almost immediately, with his eyes wide open. Other than suffocation, he’d felt no sensation, except in his toes, as if, even in his semiconscious state, something in him remembered that his life depended on them. We never talked about why he had done it. I figured he’d say, if he felt like it, without provocation, the way he’d rolled down his turtleneck one day to show me. But he never did say anything about his reasons, as if these might be even more hideous than the livid white flesh.

To say that he was a changed boy would be less accurate than
to suggest that the Claude who’d got me to barf Oreos died at the end of the rope that afternoon, leaving behind another person entirely, this one without defenses. He no longer cared to compete with me or anyone. There were no more arm wrestling contests, sprints or eating tournaments, no more sarcastic remarks about my being a wimp. When pretty girls were around he stared at them forlornly, his hands in his pockets, working there but somehow without conviction, as if he’d lost the capacity to imagine pleasure.

All in all, I preferred the old Claude, asshole though he had been. I doubt if I’d have befriended the new Claude if it hadn’t been for his mother, who seemed to take my visits as personal favors, medicinal in their effect. In fact, she looked about as forlorn as her son, and she never asked questions about where we were going or where we’d been when we returned after dark. She either trusted me completely or had concluded that I was the least of the dangers her son faced. I don’t think she ever discussed with anyone his attempted suicide or the sudden disappearance of Claude Sr. I’m not sure they even talked to each other. Whenever I visited, I never seemed to be interrupting anything, and I often got the feeling that there no longer
was
anything in that house to interrupt except silence. They often gave the appearance of having been watching each other for hours.

It finally dawned on me that Claude’s mother was waiting for him to try it again, and that part of her gratitude to me for taking the boy away for a few hours was that the time he spent with me was the only time she could relax her vigilance, at least until school started in the fall. Often when we returned home, we’d find her deeply asleep in the big armchair that had been her husband’s. It faced the kitchen door and she would not wake up if we entered quietly. Then Claude would take a seat and watch his mother sleep and breathe, though this was too spooky for me, and I’d have to leave. I always wanted to get away before she woke up and saw her son sitting there looking at her from across the dark room, across the wide chasm of his experience and her imagination.