The Risk Pool (51 page)

“The author of this work of history is Tria’s grandfather on her mother’s side, you see. And my own father,” Mrs. Ward added, as if these two were not the same person, but rather collaborators. “What we are in urgent need of is an informed and objective opinion. I am convinced that what you hold in your hands is a work of historical significance, intelligence, and refinement, but, as my daughter has pointed out to me, I am hardly objective in this matter, you see.”

“Certainly,” I said. “I mean, that’s entirely understandable.”

“I could never allow the volume to leave this room, of course, but you could examine it here, at your leisure.”

Tria was looking away now, flushed and beautiful.

“I’m not really an historian,” I said again. “Of course I’d be very interested to have a look, but—”

“Wonderful,” Mrs. Ward said. “You see dear? Help has arrived. I told you Mr.… was just the young man for us.”

“I work days—” I began.

“There is no deadline, you see,” Mrs. Ward said. “None. You would be welcome to visit us any evening. I have a project in mind, you see, but there are bridges to cross, and I am aware of each one, you see.”

“Well—”

“You will of course be compensated. We would not expect to engage the services of a graduate of the university without providing remuneration.”

This last had the ring of a line too long practiced, too desperate. “I couldn’t take money—”

“But you will read and give us your opinion.…” Mrs. Ward now held out her palms for the volume, as if it had already rested too long in the hands of a stranger, and I returned it to her, still unopened, her thin fingers closing around it like tiny vises.

“Of course I will,” I reassured her, all the while thinking, I must confess, of the sweet promise of long evenings in conference with her dark-haired daughter. “Of course I will.”

It was that dark-haired daughter who walked me out to F. William Peterson’s shiny New Yorker less than fifteen minutes later, the afternoon suddenly far shorter than I’d expected. The air had lost
its warmth, and so had my companion, it seemed to me. I couldn’t make up my mind whether Tria Ward was irritated with me or simply abstracted.

“I hope I didn’t mess up,” I said when we were out of earshot.

She allowed herself a half smile. “No,” she said. “It isn’t that. With Mother, things are never easy. Encouraging and discouraging her can be equally hazardous. I warned you not to laugh. I should have also warned you not to take her too seriously.”

“Right,” I said. “Then I’d have known just what to do.”

She shrugged. “It’s my fault anyway. I’ve seen this coming and didn’t do anything about it. Now she’s all wound up and there will be no dealing with her. You may have to be honest before you’re through, and that will earn you an enemy.”

“As long as it’s just the one,” I said, and she looked at me strangely, as if my remark would not permit interpretation. The blankness of her expression gave me a chill. It occurred to me for the first time in my long but slender acquaintance with Tria Ward that she might be slow. But I decided, as I stood there, completely charmed by the subtle flecks of color in her dark eyes, that it wasn’t true, and that it wouldn’t necessarily matter if it were. In the space of a few short hours, it occurred to me, I had fallen half in love with her again.

At least half.

My father said little about the legal difficulties that were closing in on him. In fact, he maintained that the lawsuit pending against him would never come to trial. The insurance companies would settle out of court, and the criminal negligence charge resulting from the DWI would be dropped. Beyond the mandated insurance coverage he had from the assigned risk pool, he himself had nothing, and to his mind that rendered him judgment-proof.
“What the hell do I have?” he kept insisting whenever anyone suggested he might be in trouble.

He was willing to concede that the accident would plunge him even further into the very deepest, darkest recesses of the risk pool, making his already exorbitant insurance rates astronomical, but beyond that he couldn’t see where he had anything to lose. When I asked him whether there was a chance he might go to jail, he just shrugged. He’d been there before. And it couldn’t be for too long. He’d just have to make sure he served his time during the winter, which was his bad season anyhow. “I’m all right when I’m working,” he said. “If it wasn’t for winters I’d be governor.”

In fact, he did seem to do better once he went back on the road. He’d usually wander into Mike’s Place about the time I got off and we’d have a beer before I headed home to dinner with my mother. Some nights he’d eat a hamburg steak at the Mohawk Grill or a plate of spaghetti at Mike’s, and then say he was going home. He almost never did, but I could tell he was too tired after the long day of road construction to get into much trouble. Occasionally he’d go home with the intention of showering and going out again, only to fall asleep on the sofa for a few hours, long enough to make the shortened night less dangerous. And when he stuck to beer he was okay. Shortly after my return, he started up with Eileen again, too, which I considered a good sign. “She’s a good girl,” he said. “She’s not the best-
looking
girl you ever saw, but she’s all right, just the same. We stay off the subject of her asshole kid … we do okay.”

“What’s he up to these days?” I asked, feeling little more than obligatory curiosity, thankful that since my return to Mohawk our paths hadn’t crossed and a little fearful that inquiring after his health might have the unintended effect of producing Drew Littler in the flesh. My first week at Mike’s Place, I kept expecting him to turn up, especially when it turned out that Eileen was working lunches, but he never did. I’d often thought about asking her about him, but I knew he’d been in and out of trouble and a variety of institutions, so I thought. I’d spare her. Now I was glad.

“Oh, he’s up to about here,” my father said, putting his maimed hand about a foot over his own head. “Like always. At the moment he’s the guest of the state. They caught him trying to break into some joint down the line about three in the morning, the dumb son of a bitch. He couldn’t work for a living, naturally.”

“How long is he in for?”

“Not near long enough,” my father said. “I got him a couple jobs myself, but things always wound up missing. It was never him, of course. Steal? Not him.”

It didn’t take my father much to get revved up on the subject of Drew Littler, and when he recalled conversations they’d had, he always rendered these dramatically, playing both parts, capturing the rhythms of the original discussion.

“Then how come as soon as you get hired things always start disappearing, I said to him one day. He’d just been fired, as usual. How the hell should I know, he says. Right. How the hell should you know anything, Zero. Things just vanish. They get up and walk away. As soon as you get hired, all this shit just up and walks off. It never did
before
you started working there, but now it just can’t stay put.”

“You know what he says to me, the big dumb son of a bitch? He says, that’s right, Sammy. That’s fuckin’ right.”

By this time my father was usually purple. One incident would remind him of another, and before long the veins in his neck would be pulsing. “We got into it about a year ago. He doesn’t say shit to me anymore. He’s that smart anyway, the dumb bastard.”

“You can’t tell his mother he’s no good, either.” I could tell he was unable to stop himself now. “She knows. She’s got to. But do you think she’d listen when anybody tries to tell her? Not a chance. If he’s not stealing money out of her purse, she’s giving it to him so he won’t have to. Can you imagine stealing from your own mother?”

I said no, but he wasn’t really talking to me. Drew Littler stories consumed him, and once he got started a listener wasn’t strictly necessary. He’d been through them all with Wussy and Mike and everybody else, and they never let him even get started anymore, cutting him off before he could get up a head of steam, for which he thanked them. Don’t get me started on
that
dumb son of a bitch.

But I was a fresh listener, and I had to hear these stories several times during the course of the summer. It didn’t take me long to realize that Drew Littler had become almost larger than life (no small matter) with my father, representing to him all that was wrong with things. It did little good to steer him away from the subject, because almost anything that went wrong would remind him of Eileen’s son and set him in motion. And it always ended the same way, with my father shaking his head, his eyes having
narrowed to the point that they were more inward-looking than outward, as if for the first time in his life he’d come across something he couldn’t understand. “You should see him now,” he’d tell me. “He’s as big as a house.”

And even though his eyes were little more than slits by the time he finished his rant, I could see something strange in them, something I’d never seen before.

It took me months to piece together what had happened between them. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could just ask him about. My father had already told me all he was going to tell about how they’d “gotten into it.” If I asked, all he’d do was go through the whole thing again and I wouldn’t know any more than I had to begin with. You couldn’t focus my father’s stories, get him to clarify and expand portions. He’d start all over for you, but that was about it. So I had to make do with oblique references to the incident until I could get Wussy to fill me in. I still don’t know all the details, but the outline is pretty clear, the conflict and its outcome predictable.

My father must have realized that he couldn’t keep Drew Littler buffaloed forever. Even that second year that I’d lived with my father, the boy had been far bigger and stronger, and he’d known he was, at some level that was not quite belief. But his knowledge was marching steadily in the direction of belief, and he must have awakened each morning with an iota less superstitious fear of the man who appeared to have his number. He must have felt that belief coming like a wave, must have known that the day was not far distant when none of my father’s tricks would work anymore, that there would be no way Sam Hall could get the drop on him. Or that even if he did get the drop, it wouldn’t do him any good. That afternoon they finally got into it, Drew Littler must have known, perhaps had known for some time, that he could spot my father just about any advantage and still come out on top.

Apparently my father and Wussy had been working all afternoon in the hot sun, repairing the roof on Eileen Littler’s little house. Drew, naturally, hadn’t been around to help. Probably his mother had warned him to stay away, knowing that there was no way her son and my father could work on the same roof without
one hurling the other off. And no doubt Drew had stayed away until he figured the job was done. He was every bit as lazy as my father accused him of being, and he wouldn’t have wanted to risk being taunted up onto the roof where he’d get tar on his hands and clothes and in his blond hair.

And part of their getting it on that day wouldn’t have anything to do with Drew Littler at all, but rather the lingering effects of my father’s having had to work all day in the hot sun with Wussy. No doubt my father had talked Wussy into helping because Wussy knew a little bit about roofing the way he knew a little bit about everything. Unless I miss my guess, Wussy also knew a little bit more about it than did my father, whose opinion about such matters was always, “How fucking hard can it be?” It must have been some afternoon up there, the two of them finding out how hard it could be, the hot sun on their shoulders and reflecting up into their faces off the hot tar they hauled up to the roof in buckets. No doubt my father bulled his way through tasks that required finesse, Wussy shaking his head, concentrating fiercely on damage control, trying to kid my father out of the worst kinds of dumbness and getting called “you crazy black bastard” for his trouble. Eileen probably came out every half hour or so to stand in the middle of the driveway where she could see the two of them, listen to their tug of war, ask how it was going, to which Wussy would reply that the whole job would have been finished an hour ago if only he didn’t have no help. Then my father would call him variations on the black bastard theme, Eileen, safe on the ground below, pointing out the literal truth that—covered with tar as they were—anyone would have taken them for brothers.

Sometime after she went inside the last time, Drew must have roared up on his new motorcycle, the first he’d owned since wrecking the other at the base of Jack Ward’s private road. I doubt he would have said anything to my father or Wussy, but he probably gave them a long arrogant smirk before going into the house. At the time he had some sort of job and a cheap third-floor flat on the west end, but he still showed up two or three times a day, mealtimes, according to my father, since he couldn’t cook and couldn’t afford to eat out. Usually his first stop, before saying hello to anybody, was at the refrigerator, where he’d grab the plastic gallon jug of milk and tip it upright over his mouth. According to my father he could down two quarts that way, his Adam’s apple bobbing rhythmically, machinelike.

“Don’t be going down there,” Wussy would have warned when he saw my father heading for the ladder.

“Who died and left you job foreman?”

“All right,
go
down there, rockhead.”

“There’s a six-pack of beer in the refrigerator and it’s for us. I know because I put it there. If he’s into it, I’m kicking his ass.”

By the time my father got to the foot of the ladder, Drew had emerged from the house and gone into the garage, where my father found him sucking on a beer.

Probably my father gave him the opportunity to put it back. Probably Drew Littler didn’t see much point in returning a half-guzzled beer. My father would have explained that this wasn’t the point. The point was it was
his
beer. The point was he’d been up on the roof all afternoon in the hot sun. The point was they could have used some help. The point was Drew Littler was a worthless cocksucker who didn’t know how to do anything except sponge off his mother and get into trouble. This last point I’m sure he explained to Drew Littler, because he always explained it thoroughly to me when he got going on the subject of Eileen’s son. According to Wussy, Eileen came out and tried to keep them apart, but she didn’t get there soon enough, and Wussy apparently didn’t even come down off the roof. He told me all he could see was my father’s legs dangling about eight inches off the garage floor, going like crazy, as if they were pedaling an invisible bicycle. Drew apparently had him by the throat with one big paw and was squeezing as if he intended to burst my father’s purple face like a grape. Instead, he bashed him in the skull with the half-drunk can of beer and dropped him onto the cold floor. Then Drew Littler got on his motorcycle and roared off.