The Risk Pool (36 page)

Out in the street a thaw had begun, the temperature having actually risen since late afternoon, and water was running beneath the gray snowbanks along the gutter.

“I wish I could have done it some other way,” my father said, “but I had to let you help out.”

“Help out how,” I said, unaware that I’d done anything.

I had though.

“We’ll get you straightened around, don’t worry.”

“Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

“I had that figured for your college,” he said. “So you won’t go through life a dummy.”

The next day, on the noon hour, I cut lunch at school and ran downtown to the bank to find out how bad it was. My favorite teller got to break the news, and he looked pretty guilty explaining the bank’s policy with regard to minors. I was wiped out.

In the end, things turned out pretty much the way he predicted, though it was years later, when I came back to Mohawk from the university, after a six-year absence, that I heard the story, overheard it in a bar actually, where my father was. I was the only one in the bar who’d never heard the story before.

“Simple. Anybody coulda done it. My son was all of twelve,” he
said, getting my age wrong, as usual (I was nearly fourteen), “and he coulda done it. The car’s out back of City Hall, right there in the parking lot. Somebody gives you a set of keys and a map. Then you drive the car is all. You get to where you’re going, you park the car, go sit in a bar and wait for your ride home.”

Simple. You didn’t know what was in the trunk and you didn’t want to know. All you knew was that it was worth a couple hundred to somebody to have you drive it. If it was something really bad, it would have been worth a couple hundred more, so you’re not that worried.

Simple, except that it had to snow like a bastard and he’d run into a roadblock at the entrance to the Thruway. Nobody was being let on without chains. My father had no idea whether there were chains in the trunk and wasn’t about to open it and find out. Never mind, he told the trooper. I’ll make the trip tomorrow.

It wasn’t easy getting out of line at the Thruway entrance, but he’d have made it if not for the standard transmission, which he knew how to drive, but wasn’t used to. Trying to pull away in third instead of first, he’d stalled, then couldn’t get the engine to turn over. There was nothing to do then but sit there a few minutes and listen to the drivers behind him blow their horns. Nothing but roll down the window and give them all the finger. By the time he got the car started again, some of the drivers behind him had started to go around, and when he popped the car into gear it lurched forward just in time to clip the rear end of one of the passing cars, separating from its body the rear fender, which folded neatly and drove with an eerie screech up into the radiator fan of the car my father was driving, stalling him again. Even then, things might have been all right if the driver of yet another car, also trying to pass, hadn’t seen the collision, braked himself into a skid and sluiced sideways through the fresh snow until he came to rest with a barely audible thump against the rear of my father’s car. The impact was so slight that my father was not even sure he’d been hit, and the snow on the back window prevented him from seeing that the impact had popped his trunk open as cleanly as if a key had been inserted.

It had taken ten minutes to get everything straightened out. My father exchanged license numbers with the two other drivers, got the fender extracted from the radiator, chatted with a helpful young trooper and even offered to get him Giant football tickets. My father was about to drive off when the trooper said, “Not like
that,” and went over to close the trunk that my father, during the entire conversation, had not noticed yawning open like an invitation to the penitentiary. “Goodnight, Irene,” my father said to the man he was swapping stories with, the irony, the tragedy of the whole escapade still fresh after a decade. So much for simple.

The good news was that my father knew enough about the whole deal to implicate a cop and suggest a thing or two about a couple of city councilmen. F. William Peterson handled the out-of-court negotiations skillfully and in the end my father was convicted of a misdemeanor and given a suspended sentence. Charges of transporting stolen property were dropped, and it was entered into the record that the contraband had been placed in the trunk of the car my father was driving by unknown, mysterious forces. He was even slipped a little something by the prosecuting attorney to help with the fine, and the men my father had protected slipped him a little something more for being a sport about spending the night in jail.

“I been there before,” he shrugged, but admitted that the money would come in handy, since he was already mired in the lowest depths of the insurance risk pool and the accident was going to play hell with his rates. “I don’t give a shit about me,” he explained, “but I got a kid to support.”

Losing my savings served me right, I had to admit. Having myself stolen, I considered myself, with some justification, a thief. And if there was some sort of cosmic accounting (did we not live in the Accounting Department?) at work in the universe, then I wasn’t square yet, for while I had never totaled up all that I’d copped from Klein’s I knew it had to be more than the four hundred dollars my father used to extricate himself from his “little problem” and never gotten around to paying back. Not only that, I knew I didn’t have much cause to be miffed at him, because he paid for a lot of things, like my tab over at Harry’s.

What got me thinking and worrying, though, was that he had apparently known about my savings account all along. I wondered if he was surprised when he got out of jail and found out how much I had, or if he’d been monitoring my progress all along. One thing was clear—he had been way ahead of me, like always. He’d known and he’d not let on that he knew.

And it wasn’t like I’d never been warned. According to my
mother, Sam Hall had always been slippery with money. After the war, during that first frantic year when they were going to the track all summer long, she’d leave him in line at the two-dollar window and visit the ladies’ room. When she came out, he’d be just finishing up and he’d hand her the tickets to keep warm when they got back to their seats. When the race was over and the two or three tickets my mother held were officially worthless, he’d say not to worry, he’d held on to the winning ticket himself. And there between his thumb and forefinger would be a ten-dollar winner.

The way such tickets occasionally materialized did not have the reassuring effect on my mother that he might have hoped, however, because she was smart enough to realize that the ticket’s existence had broader, unsettling implications. Somehow, she realized, my father had slipped out of the two-dollar line in favor of the always shorter ten-dollar one, then returned to where she’d left him so she wouldn’t be suspicious. She discovered that in addition to the pocket that held the tickets he admitted to, my father had other pockets, and these sometimes contained larger wagers she was kept ignorant of, which meant that she never knew where they stood. On a night when they appeared to be winning, according to the tickets he let her cash, my father’s other pockets might be bulging with losing tickets.

She tried to regulate how much money they brought to the track so that she’d know when it was gone, but often he would have more than he admitted when they left the house and he sometimes borrowed from friends once there. Putting the touch on people was something he was so adept at that the transaction was sometimes accomplished right under her nose without her suspecting a thing until later when she made him explain how they’d lost so much. The more she tried to keep tabs, the more sneaky my father became until, in the end, the track lost its appeal for her and she stopped accompanying him, which disappointed my father greatly. She wasn’t able to make him understand that she never knew which horse to root for, because she never knew where their real money rode. “I want you to tell me everything,” she insisted. “If you keep things from me, I’m lost.
We’re
lost.”

I don’t know what his response to that was, but I can guess what his solution would have been. He would have wanted her to join him in the game—to have something secreted away in the inside
pocket of her own blazer, something to surprise
him
with. You see, what I worried about most after he’d wiped me out was, ironically, what he must have thought of me for keeping my money a secret from him, or trying to. At the very least, he must have concluded that I did not trust his judgment, which of course was true, though hardly the inference I would have wished him to draw. But now I don’t think that ever occurred to him, or if it did, I don’t think he minded my reluctance to confide. And I don’t think it would have pleased him for me to be so foolish as to trust him completely.

I had the good sense not to dwell on my misfortune or consider myself unlucky. The A&P, along with one of the seven remaining glove shops, had closed permanently that winter, putting another fifty or so men out of work and making the Mohawk Grill even more crowded with dejected coffee drinkers. My father would be going back to work on the road soon, and I was still employed. I kept my old savings account and continued to add to it. Ten dollars a week. The rest I put in a new savings account in a small bank way out by the marina and made sure they sent us no monthly statement.

When the weather started warming up and the streets began to run wet with water from the still high snowbanks, there was nobody to tell me not to get my bike out and ride around Mohawk, so I did. Riding the bike felt both good and bad. Good, because it made me the envy of all the younger kids who upon seeing me went home to beg their sensible parents to haul their bikes up out of the cellar, to no avail, for another month or so. Good also because there are few things better than riding a bike after a long winter. A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of song birds, the first bright tulip bud. Still, there was something wrong with the bike that year. During the winter months it had occurred to me that a car was more suitable transportation for someone like myself, who’d be entering Mohawk High in September, and it occurred to me well after the fact that the money my father took was money I had been saving for a car. My father wasn’t just a thief, he was a car thief.

So was Drew Littler, I discovered. The only reason I knew was that he asked me if I wanted to be one too. The idea was to sneak
over to Kings Road where the expensive houses were, hot-wire somebody’s Cadillac, take it for a joy ride, and then park it in the Mohawk River. It was part of a new, intensified, comprehensive “Screw the Money People” campaign he had in mind. Swiping and/or destroying their transportation was a form of vengeance that particularly appealed to Drew since losing his motorcycle, and he bragged to me one day that he and Willie Heinz had already driven half a dozen cars into the Mohawk and watched them float off toward Albany.

He had in mind to get himself another bike, a Harley he had all picked out, as soon as he could convince his mother to sign for it. The owners were willing to let it go for a song, too, their own son having been thrown from it and killed, and his memory still fresh in their minds. Once Drew had convinced them that the bike wasn’t right after the wreck and probably never would be, they’d settled on a figure and he’d gone home to find the down payment. The first hundred he found in the top drawer of his mother’s bureau. Then he went looking for my father.

“Sure,” my father said when Drew Littler slid onto a stool next to him at the Mohawk Grill, interrupting our supper. “I’d love to loan three hundred dollars to somebody dumb enough to throw a shovelful of ice through a second-story window.”

“Come on, Sammy, I’m asking you.”

“Not really,” my father said. “Because you’re not stupid enough to think I’d give it to you. And even if I
was
stupid enough, your mother’d never go for it. You just
think
you’re asking me.”

Drew fished in his jeans pocket. “If she don’t want me to have it, how come she just gave me a hundred dollars for a down payment.”

My father never even stopped eating. Neither did he look at the money. “Let me get this straight,” he said, carving a fatty piece of rib steak away from the bone. “You want me to believe your mother gave you a hundred dollars toward a motorcycle?”

“You want to bet she didn’t?” he said. He put a pretty good face on, too. I don’t think I’d have called him. But my father apparently saw the lie even in his peripheral vision, and before the boy could stuff the money back in his pocket he grabbed the bills and handed the wad to Untemeyer, who was seated two stools down, his customary spot at the end of the lunch counter.

“Hey!” Drew Littler said, looking at the bookie so ferociously that the blood drained from the old man’s face.

“Hey, your ass,” my father said, getting the boy’s attention back. “If your mother gave you that hundred dollars, I’ll give you another five hundred. In fact, if you even came by that money honestly, I’ll give you another five. We find out you didn’t, I put the money in my pocket. We can call your mother right now.”

“She’s at work,” the boy said, so feebly that even I knew he’d been lying now. It was all over his face.

“I know the number. Meyer here can call. I won’t even say a word.”

“I got a better idea,” Drew Littler said. “I give you ten seconds to give me back that hundred or I break your face.”

“Whose?” Untemeyer said, handing over the money. “His or mine?”

“Nobody’s,” Harry said without turning around. “Go down to the pool room if you gotta fight. Kill each other, for all I care. Just not here.”

With Claude at Mohawk High and me in the junior high, I seldom saw him that winter. All things considered, he wasn’t treated that badly. True, some kids made choking noises when they passed the table that he had all to himself in the cafeteria, but they seldom got much closer or became truly abusive. No one wanted the responsibility of being personally acquainted with someone who’d tried to kill himself. About the cruelest thing was done by the principal of Mohawk High who, without being petitioned, excused Claude from his gym class requirement, an exemption granted only in cases of severe handicap. Not taking gym pretty much completed Claude’s ostracism.