The Risk Pool (45 page)

There was a phone booth in front of the Mohawk Trust, so I shouldered my duffel bag and made for that. It didn’t take me long to realize it would be useless. There was no listing for Sam Hall or Eileen Littler. My father had never had a phone. Eileen had always kept her number unlisted. I started to check on Wussy until, after a few moments of vague, dazed leafing, I remembered I didn’t know his last name. I had more or less the same problem with Skinny Donovan. There were about a dozen Donovans listed but, not surprisingly, no “Skinny.” (His real name—Patrick—I’d somehow forgotten.) It occurred to me as I stood outside the phone booth in the persistent drizzle that my knowledge of these people was incomplete, though this peculiar way of knowing—these nicknames, partial identities, aliases—represented standard commerce in Mohawk. Sign here, Tree.

There was nothing to do but readjust my thinking, get back to local time and place. The clock above the Mohawk Trust flashed the former, and I synchronized my watch, which made me feel a little better. After all, I was a tough, worldly, steely-eyed twenty-four now, and college educated to boot. If I couldn’t locate my father in his own hometown, there was something wrong with me. The place to start was the Mohawk Grill.

I never got there though. I hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps toward its buzzing neon sign, clearly audible in the late afternoon stillness, when a door opened between the Rooker Pharmacy and Lauria’s Men’s Wear and a large, well-dressed man stepped into the street, his back to me. He was in the act of struggling on with a new pair of leather gloves and I knew who it was before he even looked up.

The door that locked shut behind him confirmed it: F. William Peterson, Attorney-at-Law, was one of the names listed there.

When he looked up and saw me smiling at him, he gave me a curt nod and headed down the street in the direction I’d just come from. He got halfway to the bank before he stopped dead, stalled there for a second, then wheeled around. I’d stayed right where I was, duffel bag over my shoulder. “Ned?” he said.

“Will?” I said.

“Ned
Hall?
” He was coming toward me now, still tentatively, as if when he got there, he meant to touch my cheek to make sure I was real.

“Pop?” I said, since the situation couldn’t have been much more absurd.

He stopped right in front of me, his red face beaming. “Look at
you
,” he said, offering a gloved hand.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m looking at you.”

Poor F. William Peterson never did have much of a handshake, and he still didn’t. Always soft, he was even softer now, a boneless roast of a man. He looked genuinely glad to see me as we shook, but then he stopped in midpump, his brow darkening. “You haven’t been home yet?”

I told him I’d just that minute stepped off the bus.

He looked up and down the deserted street then, as if to be sure we hadn’t been spotted. “Thank God,” he said. “Come with me.”

A moment later we were upstairs in his second-floor office. We had the place to ourselves, half an hour past closing. Like the offices of many small-town lawyers, F. William Peterson’s could have passed for that of an insurance agent, with its cheap wood paneling and big metal desk.

“I’d better call her,” he said, picking up the phone, motioning me to a chair by the window overlooking Main, one story lower and fifty yards closer to the Four Corners, but otherwise quite similar to the view I’d had from the Accounting Department. It occurred to me that if I wanted to find my father, the best plan might be to stay right were I was. He was almost sure to come strolling out of the pool hall or the Mohawk Grill or The Glove Tavern some time in the next twenty-four hours, his hands plunged deep into his pockets, rolling gently at the knees as he surveyed his domain.

After he dialed, F. William Peterson swiveled in his chair so his back was to me. When my mother answered, he spoke softly, as
if anticipating embarrassment. “Hi,” he said. That must have been all she let him get out, because he started to say something else, stopped abruptly, and just listened. “I know,” he said. “I know. Half an hour.”

He swiveled around to make a face at me. His free hand went yap-yap-yap.

“You know Fridays,” he said, when he sensed an opening. “Half an hour, the latest.”

She must have hung up without saying goodbye, because he looked at the receiver as if they’d been disconnected. “What a woman,” he said, with red-faced cheer, and then, as if the two ideas were related, “Am I glad to see
you!
”

“How is she?” I said. “Really.”

I had spoken with him once or twice on the phone in the past few years, but my mother had always been there in the room with him, and of course her own protestations on the subject of her health I considered completely worthless.

“Better!” he said. “Almost better! Almost completely better!”

“That’s good,” I said, studying his performance.

“Down to one pill a day,” he went on. “You won’t know her. Sometimes, she even skips the one. Those are rough days, but …”

Something about the way he said this last suggested that the rough days were rougher on him than her. “Remember how she couldn’t do anything at first? Couldn’t decide ketchup or mustard? You should see her go now.”

“I’ll bet it’s something,” I said.

“What you’ll want to do,” he said, “is call her. Tonight. Tell her you’re in Buffalo or someplace like that. Give her the night to get used to it. Then come by tomorrow. She’s a trooper about day-to-day stuff, but surprises throw her.”

“All right,” I said, relieved.

His expression darkened. “Seen your father?”

Suddenly, something made sense that had been nagging at me. “
You
gave Eileen my number—”

He nodded, reluctantly. “If I’d called and your mother’d found out—” he drew his index finger across his throat. “I didn’t want you to leave in the middle of the term though. Did that foolish woman tell you to come right away?”

“No,” I said. “It sounded serious though.”

“What did she tell you?” he was watching me carefully.

“That he’s a drunk.”

He rolled his eyes. “Charming woman, Eileen Littler. The soul of delicacy.”

“Is it true?”

F. William Peterson leaned back in his chair, exhaled through his nostrils. “His most pressing problem is more immediate. He was in an accident last fall on the lake road. A young girl in the other car ended up in the hospital. Damn near died. A goddamn miracle everybody wasn’t killed, including Sam. It was a head-on collision. The good news is the girl was driving illegally, at night, on a learner’s permit and probably speeding. Her boyfriend lied to the cops, said he was driving, but we know better. The bad news is Sam was legally DWI. We’ll push the hell out of mitigating circumstances, but—”

“He’ll go to jail?”

“Almost certainly.”

“For long?”

“Probably not. And probably not for a while. The insurance companies are wrangling and the medical people are involved. It’s been six months already and it may be another year before it comes to trial. The other bad thing is that he’s been arrested twice in the meantime, the last time two nights ago. I just got him out on bail yesterday.”

This didn’t make sense. “Why haven’t they taken his license?”

“They did,” F. William Peterson said. “This is your father we’re talking about, remember?”

Unfortunately, that did make sense. In fact, I had forgotten the way he operated. To take Sam Hall’s license proved only one thing—that you didn’t know him. If you didn’t want him to drive, you had to take his
car
, not his license. And while you were at it, you’d have to take his friends’ cars, too. And even then, you’d only be making it more inconvenient for him. He had a lot of friends.

“All of this is off the record, by the way. A young colleague of mine is the attorney of record. Your mother ever found out I was involved …”

I drew my index finger across my throat. He shuddered.

We just sat and looked at each other for a minute, and suddenly we were grinning like a couple of conspirators who shared important inside knowledge, or perhaps even affection.

Finally, we stood and shook again. “Damn, it
is
fine to see you, Ned.”

I said it was good to see him, too. “You better get on over there,” I told him.

Outside in the street, we shook hands a third incredible time, and suddenly he said, “How you fixed for money?”

I was very glad he asked. “Actually …”

“Right,” he said, and handed me a twenty.

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to give it back,” I warned him.

“What difference,” he said. “You’re here. That’s the main thing.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets, because he looked for all the world like he wanted to shake on that too.

“You better call by ten-thirty. That’s when she goes to bed,” he said, flushing red in the gathering darkness.

I said I’d remember. “Any idea where I can find him?”

“Try right around the corner on Glenn. The Night Owl. If not there, Greenie’s. If not there …”

“Right,” I said.

“By ten-thirty,” he said. “You’ll … shave, of course.”

I shouldered my duffel bag and we parted. At the Four Corners I stopped and looked back up the street and saw that he’d stopped too and was waving. I waved back.

The Night Owl had been called something else the last time I was in Mohawk. I tried to remember what, and couldn’t. But I was pretty sure it was one of the few bars my father hadn’t frequented. Standing outside, I suddenly felt weak, partly from not having eaten in a while, but mostly from being spooked. The possibility that I might not recognize my own father swept over me again, and along with it a wave of nausea. I propped my duffel bag up against the wall of the tavern and sat on it for a minute or two until the low dusky sky turned honest black. From inside came the clack of billiard balls and the occasional volley of deep-throated male laughter. He probably wasn’t even in there, I told myself. In fact, I probably had a long night ahead of me. I not only wouldn’t find him here, but I’d have to hit Greenie’s and the High Life and The Glove, and the Outside Inn, and he wouldn’t be at any of them. He would be someplace like The Elms on the outskirts of town, too far to walk with a duffel bag in the dark. Or maybe he was even farther off than that, in some new favorite place in Johnstown or Mayfield or Perth, or someplace on the
Saratoga road where bars grew out of the surrounding woods like native flora. Maybe he would be out at The Lookout, the first of the bars he took me to with Tree, that afternoon in October when I’d gone to the beach with the Claudes. He could be anywhere, and it was doubtful that F. William Peterson, of all people, would know his precise whereabouts.

I was just getting to my feet when a blue pickup with a tiny camper balanced on the back pulled up at the curb and Wussy got out. He looked exactly the same, a little heavier maybe, and wearing what could well have been the same shapeless fishing hat, still full of bright hooks. “Sam’s Kid,” he said right off, as if he’d left me in this precise spot an hour ago with instructions to stay put till he got back.

We shook hands. “The rockhead inside?” he said.

I told him I’d been just about to go inside and find out.

He held the door for me. “That’s his car, so.…” He was pointing to an ancient battleship of a gray Cadillac convertible across the street, one wheel up on the curb. For some reason it had a white hood. I don’t know how I could have failed to notice and draw the necessary inference, but I had. No doubt about it, I’d lost the rhythm of Mohawk life, forgotten what to look for, how to see.

“Not that that means anything,” Wussy was saying. “He could have left it there two days ago, forgot all about it and reported it stolen by now.”

Just inside, I hesitated, grabbing the sleeve of Wussy’s blue flannel shirt. “I hear he’s in rough shape,” I said.

“Sam Hall was born in rough shape,” Wussy said, apparently unconcerned. “Or did you forget.”

We were standing in an entryway, between the inner and outer doors, the noise from inside louder now. “You better come in and say hello anyhow, before he spots you.”

We went in, Wussy making an immediate detour into the men’s room. “First thing I gotta do is pee, Sam’s Kid. Tell your old man it’s his round and I’ll be right there.”

I heard him before I saw him. There were only a dozen or so men at the long smoky bar, a few others around the pool table, off to the side. My father’s voice, the unmistakable pitch and texture of it seemed to come not so much from the far end of the room as from some prememory, filtered through amniotic fluid.
My heart fluttered in the old way, and when I located him through the smoke on the last stool before the bar cornered, I stopped and watched for a second. He was talking to a young fellow about my own age. The only vacant stool at the bar happened to be right next to him, so I slid onto it quietly, jostling him only when I stuffed my duffel bag in between our stools.

When he turned to see who’d nudged him, his eyes were red and slightly unfocused, but only for a second.

“Son,” he said.

It was almost two in the morning when I remembered I was supposed to call my mother. We’d closed the Mohawk bars and were on the lake road, climbing into the dark Adirondacks, Wussy at the wheel of my father’s convertible. For some inexplicable reason we had the top down and it was cold as hell. I was in the backseat, leaning forward between my father and Wussy, trying to take advantage of what little protection the windshield offered against the brittle wind. The dark trees extended out over the narrow road, their top branches forming a canopy, the full moon darting among them, racing us all the way.

“Shit,” I said.

What, my father wanted to know. He’d been half asleep, and didn’t know where he was.

“I was supposed to call my mother,” I said.

“You can call her from up here,” he said.

“It’s too late,” I said. “She’ll be asleep.”

“I’ll call her if you’re scared to,” he offered. “She’s used to being disappointed in me.”

“Let the kid call her,” Wussy advised. “You’ll get her all worked up and then she’ll shoot me by accident.”