The Risk Pool (41 page)

The doctor recommended getting him out of his wet clothes and letting him sleep where he was—on my bed—until morning, warning that in Drew’s condition, his morning was likely to be midafternoon. Then we were to bring him to the hospital. The gash on his head, though not life-threatening, would probably require stitches and a tetanus shot.

“You better go over to the emergency room your own self,” the doctor told my father, who, now that he had the leisure to do so, was studying his little finger and cursing it for refusing to go back into place.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said.

“I’m not,” the doctor said. “The only one I’m really worried about is him.”

I didn’t recognize this as a reference to me until I saw everybody staring at me. I guess I must have looked pretty pale. The sight of all the blood had me weak in the knees, and for about the last ten minutes everything in the apartment had taken on a vague, otherworldly quality. I didn’t think I would faint, but I was in the minority. Eileen, who didn’t look so hot herself, got a washcloth and put it to my forehead. The last thing I remember was that the washcloth came away red.

When I awoke, Wussy and I were alone in the apartment, if you didn’t count Drew Littler (and there was no reason to). Eileen had gone with my father over to the emergency room. Skinny, who claimed a twisted ankle, had begged a lift home, but Eileen wouldn’t give him one, so he’d limped a couple blocks over to Greenie’s Tavern for rye whiskey and sympathy and the opportunity to tell the tale.

All of this according to Wussy, who was in the bathroom examining the purple knot above his left eye. “You all right, Sam’s Kid?” he said when he spied me in the mirror.

I said I was.

“Me too,” he said, though the knot in the mirror continued to hold his attention. Nobody had troubled much about him when it came time to assess damages. They’d fussed about my father’s
finger and Drew’s head and Skinny’s ankle, and even about me for getting bled on. Wussy, everybody just assumed, was okay, and that didn’t seem right to me, even though it turned out to be true.

Drew Littler had taken the worst of it, that was for sure. He was sleeping fitfully now, one whole side of his face swollen hideously from ear to chin, his eye nothing but a narrow slit. The pillow beneath his head was pink.

I knew what the doctor had said, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that he might rise up out of bed and go on the rampage again. I watched him nervously until Wussy came out of the bathroom.

“What should we do it he wakes up?” I said.

Wussy started picking up billiard balls, which lay scattered underfoot around the apartment. “Run like hell,” he said, but when he saw that wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for, he relented. “He won’t be in the mood for no more fighting for a while. If you were about a quart and a half low and had a broken jaw and only one eye to see out of, you wouldn’t feel like it either. The only thing that kept him going as long as he did was stupidity.”

That was only partly reassuring. I was sure Drew Littler wasn’t out of stupidity.

I helped Wussy tape a piece of cardboard over the hole in the window, and together we picked the place up, at least some of it. “We’ve lost the twelve ball someplace,” he said when there was a space left in the rack. I didn’t have the heart to tell him where it was. He was about the unluckiest man that ever was when it came to crossfires, and now his truck’s assortment of dings and dents was richer by one.

It was late now and there was just one snowy station on the television. Wussy stretched out on the sofa and watched it for almost five minutes before he started snoring loudly.

It was nearly two hours until my father and Eileen returned, and that gave me time to think. I was groggy, but too nervous to sleep. Drew Littler, it occurred to me suddenly, was dangerously insane. Maybe he had been all along. The meaning of those trips on the motorcycle up the hill to the white jewel house, where we’d stopped outside the stone pillars and just watched, until Jack Ward came out on the patio and stared us away—all of it made sense now. I hadn’t been able to comprehend Drew Littler’s insistence that the Ward house would be his one day.

He’d expected to inherit it.

* * *

It was nearly daybreak before everybody got to sleep. Wussy woke up when my father and Eileen returned from the hospital, then fell asleep again almost immediately. My father tried to get Eileen to go home and come back midmorning, but she wouldn’t. She finally fell asleep curled up next to her son on the bed. I glanced at her there when I went to the bathroom, and felt bad for thinking then that she really was a homely woman. There were times when she was almost pretty, like when she waitressed at The Elms, all fluid, efficient motion. But when the motion stopped, it was like what had made her almost pretty drained or settled somewhere out of sight.

My father, who was spreading a sheet on the pool table when I returned from the john, read my mind. “She’s not the prettiest girl you ever saw,” he said, “but she’s one of the best.”

I said I thought so too, and he showed me his pinky, though there wasn’t much to see, taped as it was to the two fingers next to it. “Does it hurt?” I said.

“Not much,” he said, flexing the fingers that would. “Did when he set it, but what are you gonna do?”

I climbed up on the makeshift bed. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“In there,” he said. “Just in case. Aren’t you going to put pajamas on?”

I said I wasn’t. I didn’t plan to take my shoes off either. Just in case.

“Don’t worry about him,” my father said, running the fingers of his good hand through his hair. “Some day, huh?”

I said it was some day, all right.

“You okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Need anything?”

I could have used a pillow, but that was the only thing. I didn’t want Drew’s (my) pink one.

“Things get bad sometimes,” my father said, as if he thought that needed saying. “It’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

I said sure, I understood.

“If it meant something, it’d be different,” he said. “But it’s just how things are.”

I finally fell asleep to the tune of Wussy’s whistling snore, the sky outside our Main Street apartment turning gray. Maybe the bad things didn’t mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to. For a while I was back at the Ward house, part of a long circular procession of perfect strangers filing endlessly past Jack Ward’s casket. I must have done that funeral loop a dozen times before I fell into a deeper, dreamless sleep.

I never heard the footsteps on the stair outside, and the banging on the fogged glass door of the Accounting Department seemed at first a part of some new dream just getting under way. It must have gone on for some time before I struggled half-awake. F. William Peterson had just tried the door and found it to be unlocked. His face was white and he looked like he expected to find an apartment full of dead people, which, given the condition of the entryway below—broken glass everywhere, dried blood on the wall and a trail of it leading all the way up to our door—was a reasonable, if incorrect hypothesis. Behind him in the dark hallway was a small woman, and just as I became aware of her, I heard Wussy say, “Oh, shit!” and duck behind the sofa back he’d been peering over. My father was in the bedroom doorway in his undershorts. “Who is it?” came Eileen’s sleepy voice from the bedroom.

I wanted to know, too. I sat up on the pool table for a better view, and until she stepped forward from the gray hallway into the full morning light, I did not recognize my own mother.

And so began the final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn’t be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk
in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it’s away. Return we do, but only to gain momentum for our next outward arc, each further than the last, until there is no elasticity left, nothing to draw us home.

F. William Peterson had managed it all. He had found my mother a nice flat on the second floor of a stone house on Greenwood Drive. The owner was an elderly woman whose husband had recently died, and she charged my mother less than the going rate for rentals in that area. I was part of the deal. I would mow the lawn with her rickety old mower in summer, rake leaves and incinerate them in the big rusted drum in autumn, shovel the sidewalk and the long drive that led from the street to the empty two-car garage in winter. (Neither we nor our landlady would own a car until 1965, the second half of my senior year in high school, when I bought a 1959 battleship-gray Galaxie to take me west to the university.)

There was no way F. William Peterson could have saved the old house, and most of its profits had been eaten up, but we were far from destitute. The furniture was still ours and a few thousand dollars besides. And my mother, who had to continue her medication and was thus certified disabled, received a small Social Security benefit. From my new cozy bedroom window, I had a nice view of our quiet, tree-lined street, one of the ones Drew Littler and I had cased on his motorcycle.

I think F. William Peterson had pretty much made up his mind to marry my mother once the matter of her still being married to my father could be resolved. I don’t think she had done anything to give him the impression that she would marry him, but she hadn’t exactly told him she wouldn’t either. At thirty-eight, she’d gone almost completely gray, a metamorphosis that had taken only a few short months once the process had begun. In other respects, however, she looked more youthful than she had in years. The terrible frailty that had laid waste to her girlishness in the year before her nervous breakdown was reversed, and she had put on some weight. The thin breast that F. William Peterson had caught a glimpse of inside the pale green hospital gown was ample again, and he couldn’t have admired my mother more had he made her himself from his own design, which in a sense he had.

In the beginning, he was our frequent, our only, visitor for dinner, though he never stayed the night.

Incredible though it may seem, my other life simply ceased to
exist. I didn’t see my father anymore, seldom saw any of his friends, never went into the Mohawk Grill. At my mother’s insistence I quit my job cleaning Rose’s and I had to give up my golf ball business, too; in return for these considerations I again got used to clean sheets, freshly pressed shirts, dinners eaten at a table in the house where I lived. I saw Wussy once and he told me that Drew Littler was in the state mental facility in Utica. After I’d gone back to live with my mother he’d gotten himself arrested three times for trespassing at the Ward house, and each time he was thrown in jail, where he entertained the drunks and the duty officer by beating his own forehead bloody against the bars of his cell until he passed out.

One day, about a month after we moved into the new flat, the doorbell rang and it was two policemen who wanted to talk to me about the disappearance of Willie Heinz. My mother informed them that she knew the family in question, and she was certain that her son had no more than a passing acquaintance with such a boy. I followed the cops down to their car and told them about the afternoon I’d come out of Our Lady of Sorrows and seen Willie race by, a police car in hot pursuit. They wanted to fix the exact date and time, and it turned out I was able to because of Jack Ward’s death. Nobody they’d questioned, it turned out, remembered seeing him after me, which was pretty spooky. Did he ever talk about running away? they wanted to know. Did he ever discuss his home life? I told them no. I wanted to add that he seemed incapable of running more than a few blocks without doubling back, but I didn’t know how to explain without implicating myself in about a year’s worth of petty vandalism.

All in all, we were not unhappy, my mother and I. Greenwood Drive was not a bad place to live and the flat became home soon enough. “So many lovely things,” my mother mused one day, with her now familiar vague smile. She was examining one of the items I’d stolen from Klein’s Department Store. “So many lovely things, and I cannot remember owning them.”

But in the hospital and then the nursing home, she had stared at a great many mysteries and had learned to accept what was.

What she and F. William Peterson feared was another war. It was Sam Hall they were dealing with, after all, and they both had good cause to remember what that could mean. The lawyer had purposely
taken a second-floor apartment for my mother and he’d installed new locks, front and back, at considerable expense, just in case things took an ugly turn. He also arranged for certain preparations at City Hall. Nobody asked me what I thought, but I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. Even with my mother eating Libriums, it wouldn’t have taken more than a phone call or two of the sort my father was a past master at to send her back to the nursing home, deadbolt locks or no deadbolt locks.

Anyway, the attack never came.

One afternoon, a week before summer vacation was to start, I came home from school and Wussy’s pickup was parked out front with the tailgate down, looking pretty thoroughly out of place on our green street. He and my father were coming out of the garage when I pulled my bike into the driveway.

“Hello, stranger,” my father said, and a wave of guilt washed over me so powerfully that my knees went liquid. “You forget where downtown is?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you must be invisible,” Wussy said.

“We got it set up pretty good,” my father said. “It should go inside, really, but your mother wouldn’t hear of that.”

I looked up at the row of windows along the second floor. A curtain twitched in one.

When Wussy went back to the pickup, my father and I didn’t say anything for a minute. In the two years I’d lived with him we’d gotten to the point where, on a good day, we might actually converse, at least a sentence or two. But in the few weeks since I’d returned to live with my mother, we’d already lost the knack.