The Risk Pool (34 page)

“It must be Dummy Day,” I heard my father say.

I have heard expressed more than once a theory that claims a direct relationship between skill at pocket billiards and a corresponding lack of skill in matters sexual. I lean toward the theory, especially if you happen to be talking about adolescents. In Mohawk, all the best pool shooters had reputations as ladies’ men, but I could never see where these reputations were earned or deserved. There was the general sense that guys who hung around the pool hall were men of the world, and stories of conquest travel even better over green felt than calm water. But I never knew back then, nor do I know now, a real stud with a pool cue who could carry on a normal conversation with a woman.

I’m not talking about the sort of player who shoots well enough not to embarrass himself, who can make the occasional bank shot and still leave himself in position for the eight. I mean the guys who can do real magic, the ones who can’t find a game without leaving town and who leave town, often as not, in a hurry, their underwear still in a drawer at the Y.M.C.A., custom pool cue in
its case tucked neatly under one arm. And I’m talking about that lower echelon of players who aspire to such an existence.

The ignorance of such men concerning women is peculiar, many of them having participated greedily in numerous obscenities, and feeling no compunction about dropping their trousers in the dark room above the pool hall for some toothless old woman hired off the street at a flat hourly rate who has no idea how long the line outside in the hallway is growing. Such men are sometimes adept at slipping quietly up the back stairs to a dingy third-floor flat where graveyard husbands dwell with bored young wives. But this is the extent of their experience.

I called Tria Ward just that once from the Mohawk Grill, and then I took up pool, a magic, hypnotic sport, a Freudian playground of balls, stiff rods, a variety of holes to approach from a variety of angles, all promissory, all destined to be filled, eventually, regardless of the shooters’ skill. Don’t take my word for it. Watch a foursome of thirteen-year-olds around a pool table in somebody’s basement. See how long it takes one of them to see the cue as a makeshift prick, placed proudly between the legs and waved around to the detriment of lamps and wall hangings. No thirteen-year-old sharpie is ever content to just sink a shot, he’s got to ram it into the pocket manfully. He’d rather miss altogether, sending the ball skittering along the concrete floor, than have it roll harmlessly up to the precipice, quiver there a moment before giving in to gravity.

No thirteen-year-old but me, that is. For this is precisely the game I learned to play on the table my father and Wussy set up in our living room. After the Mohawk Fair in September, the chill winds my grandfather had known so well made a memory of the summer of 1960. It was then too cold to dive for golf balls or hang out at the Sacandaga Marine. I entered eighth grade, my last at Nathan Littler Junior High. When school got out I went home and shot rack after rack of pool feeling peaceful and glad. Sometimes I let Claude come with me because he had become even more of an object of ridicule after it became widely known why he always wore turtlenecks and talked in a hoarse whisper. He shot pool like he did everything else now, listlessly, expecting defeat, ensuring it by not concentrating or missing on purpose (no one could really have been so bad) on those rare occasions when he found himself in a position to win. Not only was I far too good for Claude, I was becoming too good for almost everybody, including my father, an
indifferent pool shooter who could never keep his mind on the game, sometimes could not remember whose turn it was, having been lured into a nearby conversation at the bar. He was a little better when he played for money, but not much. After a while I could beat him easily, though I seldom did, afraid that he would intuit from my growing mastery that I was neglecting my studies, which I was. I continued to read voraciously, almost everything except that which had been assigned, and years later I was told that I occasioned many an argument among my teachers, some of whom claimed I was a brilliant underachiever, others that I was just another homegrown militant moron. I don’t remember coming to any conclusion about my teachers at all.

Pool I thought about constantly, seeing in my mind’s eye during civics class the brightly colored balls rolling straight and true over green felt. I played hundreds of imaginary games, mapping strategies, examining contingencies, discovering character flaws and weaknesses in my imaginary competitors. I stopped playing in public, not wanting anybody to know how good I was getting, but playing sometimes into the early morning hours when my father stayed out, bolting for bed only when I heard him coming on the stairs below. I had no goal in mind, no plan to check my progress by playing local studs, no need to boast. Playing was enough, and the table drew me like a beautiful woman, satisfying me, I’m ashamed to admit, completely.

When the old woman who had let my father and Wussy cart off the table died a few short months after her husband and the beneficiaries to her estate discovered the table missing, they tried to force my father to give it back, claiming he had duped a senile old woman into believing the table worthless. They believed it to be worth upwards of a thousand dollars. My father told them they could go fuck themselves, then hired F. William Peterson to tell them the same thing, later refusing to pay the lawyer’s fee. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to surrender the table. Tria Ward, away at a private girl’s school in New England, I thought about seldom, and as the long gray Mohawk winter settled in, my world was lit by the hot bare bulb that dangled from the high ceiling directly above the table’s smooth green lawn and buffed mahogany.

That winter promised to be nip and tuck, like all my father’s winters. He got himself laid off, as was his custom, around Thanksgiving
and signed up for unemployment the next day. After a few weeks the checks started coming and it looked like we’d be all right until spring. I
knew
I would, but my father was always a question mark because his habits never changed, even when his income did. If anything, not working was the double whammy where Sam Hall was concerned, because he not only didn’t have as much money, but even more time to discover uses for it. Once the leather shops started laying off after the holidays he didn’t have to go looking for a poker game. They were everywhere, the only visible sign of a fluid economy in town, if you didn’t count the half-dozen downtown gin mills and the Mohawk Grill, where Harry sold little but coffee, though he sold a great deal of that at a dime-a-cup clear profit. Most of the stores along Main closed at two or three in the afternoon on weekdays to conserve heat, and the snowbanks grew so high that only the heads of people on the opposite side of the street were visible. My father’s convertible, its rag top up for the season, he refused to park anywhere except in front of Klein’s, and he left it at increasingly crazy angles, the passenger-side wheels two or three feet higher up the bank than those on the driver’s side. One night in January there was a thaw and when we came down to the street in the morning a crowd was gathered around my father’s car, which was balanced precariously atop a fire hydrant that had been invisible beneath the snowbank the night before when my father had come home. It was barely visible even now, its yellow top wedged in behind the convertible’s right front wheel. By that night we were famous, a picture of the car gracing the front page of the
Mohawk Republican
. My father had me stand next to the convertible with my arm extended, so that it looked for all the world like I was holding the car up with one hand.

For a while he tended bar at The Elms on weekends and Mike’s night off, but then he stopped doing that and we didn’t go out there for a while. During the winter Mike’s business tailed off because people hated getting stranded way the hell and gone out there, two whole miles from Mohawk, when they could just as easily get stranded at Greenie’s or some other place in town. I suspected, however, that the real reason was that my father and Eileen were on the outs. The only thing he would say about it was that he couldn’t take being around Numb Nuts. There had to be more to it, though, because Drew Littler was seldom home. Since wrecking his bike, he’d turned eighteen and dropped out of school and become even more morose, hanging out at the pool
hall all hours where he bragged about knowing how to hot-wire cars whenever he needed transportation. He was theoretically saving up for a new bike by shoveling snow and doing odd jobs that, according to my father, even a dummy couldn’t fuck up. He didn’t have much luck though, even with foolproof employment. When my father got him a job shoveling out the parking lot of a hardware store over on Union, Drew threw a shovelful of hard-packed snow through the second-story window and got canned.

That night Eileen met the three of us (Wussy was along) at the back door on our way in. Drew was at the small kitchen table eating a long Italian roll he’d stuffed with ham and cheese and everything else he could find in the refrigerator.

“Don’t start on him,” Eileen warned my father.

But my father had been steaming ever since he’d heard, and there was no stopping him, at least not right away. “Put that sandwich down a minute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

Drew kept eating.

“First-floor window I can see,” my father said, standing over the boy. “A mistake. A dumb mistake, but … a mistake. Dumb for anybody else, normal for you. But how the fuck could you throw a block of ice through the second-floor window and sit there and tell me it was a mistake?”

“I didn’t say nothin’ to you,” Drew said.

This was true. My father had been anticipating the exchange all the way over in the car, figured that Drew would claim it was an accident, but had forgotten to wait for the boy to say it.

“You’re telling me you did it on purpose? You threw a block of ice through a window on purpose?”

“I ain’t telling you shit,” Drew said.

“I wouldn’t either,” Wussy said. “I wouldn’t explain to nobody who parks on top of fire hydrants.”

“Bullshit,” my father said, surprised by Wussy’s disloyalty, despite its predictability.

“Bullshit yourself,” Wussy said. “Anybody didn’t know better would swear he was your kid brother.”

My father looked at each of them, saw that he was clearly outnumbered, shook his head and went back outside. In a minute we heard him shout, so we all crowded at the window to see what was up. He was standing in the middle of the drive and he had a shovelful of snow, which I thought for a minute he was going to toss at us. Instead he flipped it gently to the top of the snowbank.
“I’ll do it once more, Zero,” he said. “Watch carefully. Even you can master this.”

One afternoon in early March, when the snow had turned as gray as the low sky and the weathered buildings along Main, I came home from school and was surprised to find the apartment empty. My father’s Mercury, more rust than metal after the severe winter, was parked at the curb out front. Lately, my father had taken to falling asleep on the sofa in the afternoons after long nights at the poker table, snorting guiltily awake when I came in, professing surprise to have drifted off, even though it was pretty obvious that he had “drifted” off several hours earlier. Today, though, I had the place to myself. I shot a few racks of pool waiting for him to show up, pretty sure he would because the car was down there in the street.

Shortly after five Rose stuck her head in and regarded me suspiciously. She left the salon the same time every day, her red hair a wine-colored cloud through the frozen glass of the door. Her stopping was unusual. She usually slid an envelope with my pay under the door sometime on Monday; otherwise, I rarely saw her.

She looked the pool table over as if it confirmed her worst suspicions. “You okay?” she said.

I said I was, trying to think if there was some reason I wasn’t supposed to be.

“Can you lock this door?” she said, twisting the knob.

“I guess,” I said. “If anybody wanted to.”

She studied me, reluctant, for some reason, to leave. I didn’t think she was waiting for an invitation to shoot a rack of pool or I’d have asked her. “You ever see your mother?” she said finally.

“Sometimes,” I said. In truth, it hadn’t been since Christmas. I hated for people to ask that question because it always felt like an accusation. “She’s in Schenectady.”

“Where would you live if you didn’t live here?”

“With him, I guess,” I told her. “With my father. Wherever.”

“You could live with me,” she said. “I suppose. For a while.”

It was clear that she had so little appetite for this prospect that I wondered why she’d bothered to give it voice. I told her thanks.

She was no sooner gone than I heard Wussy’s lumbering approach on the stairs outside. “I suppose we should all be thankful
this ain’t no ten-story building,” he said, kicking his boots off in the hall and leaving his down vest on the floor next to them. “How’s things here in the Accounting Department?”

I said fine. My father had never bothered to scrape off the black letters stenciled on the door. It didn’t bother either of us, or even seem strange anymore.

We shot a couple of racks of pool. Wussy was a pretty fair shooter, but I stayed right with him, winning more than I lost, a fact that did not appear to impress him particularly.

“Let’s you and me go eat a hamburg steak, Sam’s Kid.”

It was dinner time all right and I was pretty hungry, but I said maybe I’d better wait for my father.

“We’ll just be across the street,” Wussy said. “Even Sam Hall could find us there without no trouble.”

That was true, so I went along, still wondering where my father could be. The convertible hadn’t moved and he wasn’t in it asleep or anything because I checked. I half expected to see him at the counter in the Mohawk Grill, but he wasn’t. Harry had a pretty good crowd and a waitress on the floor, but he came over to take our order personally.

“So?” he said.

“So,” Wussy agreed.