The Risk Pool (59 page)

“How come the guy before this one didn’t do that?” Marion wanted to know.

“He was black,” I explained seriously. “Black people aren’t allowed to throw things.”

“That don’t seem fair,” Marion frowned. “I thank you’re pulling my laig.”

“Maybe a little,” I said. “Actually, the black guy was supposed to throw his cue too.”

“Well I should thank so,” she said, clearly relieved. “This
is
America, after all.”

During my entire conversation with Marion, I was aware of Drew Littler studying me through narrowed eyes, as if, despite the physical resemblance, he couldn’t quite believe that I was the kid he’d known. “I hear you’re tending bar down to Mike’s,” he said, rather pointedly putting an end to our banter. “How come you got that job?”

I shrugged, unsure whether he was asking why I’d taken it or how I’d got so lucky to be offered. I decided maybe it was the latter. “Things just worked out,” I said.

“Sammy got it for you, I bet.”

“He and Mike are friends,” I admitted. “Why? You looking for work?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Right kind of job comes along.…”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said, vaguely wondering what Drew Littler would consider the right job.

Nobody said anything for a minute. My father broke a new rack of balls. The skinny kid had disappeared before it occurred to anybody to ask him to pay for the broken cue. As far as I could
tell, my father hadn’t so much as glanced in our direction since I’d joined Drew and Marion.

“Don’t you want to know what I do?” Drew said finally.

“Sure,” I said.

He drained his beer, watching me all the while, traces of a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth. Marion looked from Drew to me, then back again, probably wondering how she’d managed to disappear so completely when she’d been in the center of things a few seconds earlier.

“No you don’t,” Drew Littler said. “You don’t need to ask me what I’m looking for because you don’t plan to put in no good word anyhow. Hell, you’d warn ’em about me.”

“I think I’m gonna go find the little girl’s room,” Marion said.

“You do that,” Drew Littler said, without bothering to look at her.

I pushed my chair out of the way so Marion could slide out of the booth. Then Drew and I both watched her angle through the crowded bar, a few of the men turning to watch her with mild interest and losing most of it when they saw her wide hips straining against the fabric of her jeans.

“She’s a whore,” Drew said matter-of-factly when the door to the rest room swung shut behind her.

I didn’t say anything. He was right. Unkind, but right. Marion was a whore. Right too that I wouldn’t be recommending him for any jobs. And he was right about why I hadn’t asked him what he was looking for.

“We need us another beer,” he said, suddenly friendly again.

“Listen,” I said. “I gotta go.”

“One more,” he said, putting a big hand on my shoulder in case I was of a mind to stand up. “Be right back.”

My father came over when he was at the bar. “How you doing?” he wanted to know.

“Fine,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” he said, returning to the table in time to see his new opponent drop the eight ball.

Drew Littler set a fresh beer down next to the one that was still three-quarters full. Marion had drained her Seven and Seven, but he’d just bought beers for the two of us. “You know who stole that two hundred from my old lady?”

“Who?” I said.

“Me,” he replied. “Who’d you think?”

I took a swig of beer. “At least you’re honest.”

He nodded. “At least I’m honest. Your old man thinks I’m no good.”

There was little point in denying that, so I didn’t. “Don’t let it worry you,” I said. “He was telling me earlier that he was no good himself.”

He studied me for a minute, as if considering all of the ramifications of this intelligence. But when he finally spoke, I couldn’t be sure he’d even heard. “The only person in the whole world who thinks I’m good for something is my mother. Maybe this’ll teach her.”

I said I didn’t think so.

“Me either,” he said. “Women are dumb. Speaking of which.”

“Hi.” Marion slid back into the booth. “You two decide not to argue?”

“We sure did,” I told her.

“Good,” she said, then to me, “You’re a bad boy. I watched the whole end of that game and nobody threw their stick.”

“Cue,” I said.

“You know what I hear?” Drew Littler said to Marion, who had noticed our fresh beers and her own empty Seven and Seven. “Old Nedley here’s been slipping it to my little sister.”

Again, nobody said anything for a second.

“Well, that does it,” Marion said, sliding back out of the booth again. “Here I thought I was going to have a fun night off for once.” When neither Drew nor I offered an explanation for why her modest expectation hadn’t materialized, she said, “I just don’t see why people have to act so mean.” And then she headed for the door, hips and breasts all astir.

“Hey,” Drew Littler said, suddenly confidential now that we were alone. “Remember how we’d go up there on the Harley and sit outside the gate?”

“And you said it would all be yours one day.”

“I never figured on him dying like that,” he said. “What a hell of a night that was. You remember that night?”

I said I did.

“I never knew for sure until then,” he said. “When your own father dies, you know … in here.” He thumped his massive chest. “That’s how I knew for sure.”

“You went out there today,” I said, remembering the strange
sound of Tria’s voice on the phone when she said they had a “situation.”

“What a night,” he nodded. “What a goddamn night. More than anybody knew.”

I couldn’t tell, either from looking at him or listening to the sound of his voice, whether he was in the present or back ten years ago on the night it had taken my father and Wussy and Skinny Donovan and his mother and, finally, a doctor with a horse tranquilizer to fell him into welcome oblivion. And he’d been smaller then. Now he was bigger than my father and Wussy put together, and there was no Skinny Donovan to kick him in the head if they were lucky enough to get him down, and no doctor handy with a long needle.

My father was right. He was big as a house.

All the lights were out in the Ward house when I drove up and parked in the circular drive. Mohawk, or a small part of it, glittered below and I cut the engine to listen to the quiet, hoping that Tria wouldn’t be asleep, that she’d peek out the window and see me sitting there in my father’s convertible. And not call the cops.

Not that I’d have blamed her much if she did. It was after midnight, which made me about six hours late, by conservative estimate. Six hours during which she would have had time to consider what, if anything, our becoming lovers the night before had meant to me. I was about to drive back down the hill and into town when a lawn chair shifted on the small enclosed patio a few feet away and a cigarette glowed red and died. In the dark I couldn’t tell from the silhouette whether it was Tria or her mother. I didn’t want to be wrong.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

I climbed up and sat on the back of the front seat, unsure of my current status. “And a lot I do.”

“I’ve regretted that about a dozen times today.” Her voice was silky in the dark and I suddenly had a different regret of my own.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m sorry you feel that way. Because I don’t.”

“It hasn’t occurred to you to wonder if I was on the pill?”

“I
did
actually, once or twice.”

“Well, I am, so you don’t have to worry. Or run away.”

“Listen,” I said. “Can I join you? I feel like an idiot all the way over here.”

“Stay there, then. Feel like an idiot.”

I did. Both.

“I’m the idiot,” she said after a minute. “We’re all crazy in this family.”

Her use of the word “all” spooked me. After all, there was just herself and her mother, unless she was including her father in the equation. Or unless Drew Littler had convinced her to think of him as family.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark now and I could see her better. She was barefoot and wearing a thin robe that reached only to the knees. Her dark hair was down around her shoulders the way I liked it.

“Did I tell you why I left Swarthmore?” she said.

“No,” I admitted.

“I was on academic probation,” she said. “Valedictorian of St. Mary’s, class of ’67. Academic probation, ’68. Guess how much I studied.”

“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “I never studied much the first couple years.”

“
I
studied every night. Every minute.”

If she’d planned to surprise me, she had. My own experience had been that even the appearance of industry could sucker a B out of most professors. Academic probation was strictly for alcoholics, scholarship athletes, fraternity men, and those who hadn’t discovered the college of education. “There are big differences between colleges,” I said, for something to say. “I didn’t go to Swarthmore, or anywhere close.”

“You’re smart though,” she said. “I’m just smart enough to know when other people are smart. Daddy was smart. I remember that about him. Mother thinks she is, but she isn’t.”

“Does it matter so much?”

“Yes,” she said. “When people tell you that you are, and you believe them, and it turns out that you’re not, it’s important. It makes you wonder what else you’ve been wrong about. Maybe everything. I was told today that I had a brother I didn’t even know about.”

“If you believe anything Drew Littler tells you then you’re right about not being too smart.”

“I do believe him,” she said stubbornly, happy to have tricked me into admitting her stupidity. “So does my mother.”

“No she doesn’t,” I heard myself say. “She just hates your father. It suits her to think of him as a continuing embarrassment. Now she’s got another cross to bear.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“Believe it,” I told her. “I’m smart, remember?”

“Anyway,” she said. “It’s too terrible not to be true.”

“You’re wrong,” I said, not caring much about the truth of it. “He just wants it to be true. He doesn’t know. His mother may not even know.”

“He knows,” Tria said.

“He believes,” I said.

“So do I, then,” she said, even more stubbornly than before.

“I’m going home,” I said after a long silence. “It’ll probably look different in the morning. If you imagine Drew Littler’s related to you, it’s because you haven’t seen him in natural light.”

“He’s a horrible person, isn’t he?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I said, feeling immediately a deep twinge of conscience without knowing exactly why. Perhaps it was because this wisdom on the subject of Drew Littler was so conventional, universal even, that my contribution was unnecessary, even cruel. Perhaps it was because I had known him as a boy, before the verdict was in. Or that the part of me where wishful thinking held sway wasn’t sure the verdict
was
in.

I slid down behind the wheel of my father’s convertible, my hand on the ignition key.

“He mentioned you today,” Tria said.

“Really?” I didn’t want to know what he’d said.

“He said you were sweet.”

“Sweet?” I tried to imagine Drew Littler saying that.

“He said you hate choosing sides in things.”

“He remembers the way I was when we were boys.”

“Last night, I thought you were sweet,” she said.

“And now?”

“I think you’ve chosen sides.”

I dropped the convertible off in front of the jewelry store, right where my father could find it in the morning. I’d started home on foot when the door to the tavern across the street was flung
open and my father came out and weaved across the street. He never noticed the car and wouldn’t have noticed me either if I hadn’t called out to him.

“Hello, son,” he said seriously, his legs waffling.

“I brought the car back,” I said, nodding to it.

“There it is,” he said, apparently surprised to discover it so close. “Take it home. Bring it back tomorrow. The next day. Whenever.”

“I’m going to walk,” I said.

“Take it,” he insisted.

I told him I really wanted to walk, and he shrugged. “You want to come up a minute? Crash here if you want.”

“Nah,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

“Listen,” I said. “This thing with Drew. You can walk away from it. He doesn’t want any trouble. He likes you.”

“I know it,” my father said. “That’s the weird part.”

“It’s
all
weird,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Tell your dolly not to worry. I’ll take care of him.”

“You know what he wants then?”

“
Oh
yeah.”

“Can’t you just get Eileen to tell him Jack Ward wasn’t his father?”

“Kinda tough,” my father said.

“Why?” I said stupidly.

“Because he was. Probably.”

Probably.

In the end it was a mere word that sent me packing, in high moral indignation and fear, before the summer was over. In fact, I nearly left that night. I had a few hundred dollars saved, enough to get me a fair distance if I didn’t care how I traveled and didn’t mind ending up broke when I got there. And I didn’t care, not that night.

It seemed to me, as I headed home along the dark quiet streets of Mohawk, that the whole world suffered from an epic lack of understanding, an epic surplus of probablies. Nobody knew what they needed to know, and because of it, things were slipping away. Inside the black houses that lined the streets, people were
sleeping blissfully, the hot day having finally surrendered to reassuring breezes in the tops of the trees, but in a few hours tomorrow would dawn hot and, it seemed to me, tragic. Probably. After all, today had begun with Skinny Donovan’s death and ended with a series of reverberations, aftershocks from twenty-five years in the past. This time the night before, Tria Ward and I had sat together on the closed-in patio overlooking the city and watched the gathering storm. It will blow and blow and not amount to anything, Tria had said, but it did amount to something just the same, as she may have feared it would.