The Risk Pool (64 page)

He must have guessed that he was wrong about things that first time he went to jail after battering the Negro boys outside the pool hall, must have seen the significance of finally getting out as a result of judicial discretion, not force of will. In his cell he’d have had plenty of time to think about the iron that neither bent nor
moved. He had little else to think about in that cell. In there he would not have heard of Jack Ward’s death and would not have known that it was a dead man’s car he and Willie Heinz were stealing the minute he got out of jail. He must have found that out only when he got back to town, and by then everything in the world had changed. He’d still been damp from the river when we’d found him braced up in the entryway to my father’s flat, raving and belligerent, the two deaths merging in what was left of his rationality. It must have taken Jack Ward’s Lincoln a while to sink, and depending on where he had driven it into the river, the car may have made it a fair distance out into the current. Even in the dark he must have seen its black silhouette drifting downstream toward Amsterdam. They had barrel-assed down to the water’s edge, no doubt, whooping all the way, and then something had gone wrong. Willie Heinz, who couldn’t swim, had remained in the drifting car, trapped, probably afraid to open the door. Or perhaps they’d been drinking all during that long afternoon joyride and Willie Heinz had passed out or been drunk enough to imagine he wouldn’t be afraid, until it was too late. I’d thought of a dozen or so variations on this basic scenario, and one of them had to be the truth.

There was now very little of the young Drew Littler it had taken three men and a needle-wielding physician to subdue that night. And I couldn’t think of much to be gained from the truth. Maybe truth wasn’t a concept I’d ever been all that devoted to. For the sake of the human race, it wouldn’t be wise to execute all the liars.

“Actually,” I told Drew Littler. “I dropped by to ask a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’d like to ask you not to let my father pick a fight with you.”

“Tell
him
.”

“Nobody can tell him anything,” I smiled. “You know that.”

“Then I’m not responsible, am I.”

“Nope,” I said. “That’s why it’s a favor. Say it’s for an old friend.”

He studied me then and what he said surprised me, though it probably shouldn’t have. “We was never friends,” Drew said. “I’d’ve known.”

The simple truth of his statement shamed me. He was right. I had no business asking him for a favor. I had always blackly hated
him, even worse than my father hated him, perhaps. He was almost as dumb as my father thought, and twice as dangerous, but he wasn’t the sort of man you could flatter into thinking you’d once been friends.

On the other hand, he wouldn’t hold it against you that you hadn’t been, and a second after he’d said his piece, he held out a hand. “We could shake anyhow,” he said.

I took the hand. We shook.

“Don’t worry about Sammy,” he said.

I waited, but that was all he had to say on the subject. “All right,” I said. “I won’t.”

I turned the key in the ignition and the car’s exhaust spit very nearly solid matter. When I started to back down the drive, Drew Littler rapped on the hood. “You know what happened back then, don’t you,” he said.

“Know what?” I said.

I’d become a far better liar since that day twenty years ago when I’d told my first-grade classmates how come my father wasn’t around. Drew Littler couldn’t have told from my face. I’ve been over it and over it, and that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.

I put in a quart of oil before leaving town, but my father’s convertible gave a dreadful shudder and died right on the county line about ten miles out of Mohawk. The good news was I was at the crest of a long gradual hill that wound all the way down to the river, so I put the car in neutral and let it coast the last mile right into a gas station at the foot of the hill. The convertible came to rest right next to a phone booth, but I didn’t use it. I’d delayed my getaway too long already. I signed the title back over to my father, stuffed it in the glove box, and locked the car. A southbound Trailways bus was parked a block and a half down the street and I got on. That night I called Mike’s Place from New York and left a message.

It was almost three months later, a couple days after Thanksgiving, when the telephone rang and I recognized my father’s voice.

“Well?” he said.

“Well hello,” I said.

“How come you’re never home when I call?”

I told him I was working every minute to pay for the dark,
dreadful apartment I’d rented and the few sticks of ratty furniture I had to keep me company.

“You’re all straightened around though?”

I said I was all straightened around.

“Want to run up for a day or two?”

“Sure,” I said. “Christmas is coming …”

“Have to be tomorrow to do any good,” he said. Then he explained why. “Eileen will understand if you can’t.”

Drew Littler’s funeral was going to be in the afternoon. They’d been trying to reach me and my father had gone over to my mother’s, hoping she’d know my number. “How the hell did I know she’s gone to San Diego of all fucking places?” he said. And for the next ten minutes he regaled me with the difficulties he’d had tracking me down through F. William Peterson’s old law firm, how they wouldn’t give him the California number, how he’d had to have Wussy find out, how somebody ought to have his ass kicked for keeping secrets, how my mother hadn’t wanted to give him my number, how F. William Peterson had had to call back and leave it at Mike’s Place. “He knew he better had,” my father said, his voice rich with the memory of having shown F. William Peterson, on numerous occasions, where the bear shit in the buckwheat. “I never heard of this Balboa Island, but I bet I could find it, and I got just about enough money to get there, too.”

A dreamy distant feeling had come over me as I listened to him talk, thoroughly sidetracked, imagining, as had always been his habit, that other people’s stories were his own, that you couldn’t understand their complete meaning unless they got filtered through his point of view. Eventually, he got back to Drew Littler. He’d been going so fast that when he hit the side of the Chevy van the impact had knocked the vehicle clear off the highway and onto its side in the ditch. Drew himself had ruptured the van’s side paneling and ended up inside. “Most of him, anyhow,” my father said. The driver of the van had had a green light and never saw the Harley enter the intersection. Eyewitnesses guessed Drew Littler had to be going a hundred. They said the Harley neither slowed nor swerved before impact.

“So,” my father said. “You still there.”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Where’s your apartment?”

I told him.

“I had one a couple blocks from there,” he said.

“When?”

“A long time ago. Right after I left your mother. And you.”

We left it that I’d try to get home around Christmas. “Send Eileen a card if you can find one,” he said.

I said I would.

“She’s a good girl,” he reminded me. “Now she’s got one less headache.”

“Jesus, Dad,” I said.

“Well?”

“It’s an awful thing to say.”

“Not really,” he said. “Be honest.”

“It really is. Honestly.”

“If you say so,” he said. “Anyway, remember. The streets go one way, the avenues the other.”

“Thanks,” I said. Words to live by.

“Is Balboa Island really an island?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “She says the sun shines every day.”

“Good,” he said. “Good for her.”

During the next decade I saw my father no more than a dozen times, this despite the fact that the buses ran from the Port Authority in Manhattan right to the cigar store on the Four Corners in downtown Mohawk in just under five hours. Twice during this period he called me from the Bronx with tickets to Yankee ball games that had come to him via a route so circuitous that it took him the first couple innings to explain. There was this guy who got them at work and who gave them to a guy who couldn’t go, who gave them to his cousin, who discovered that morning that his car wouldn’t start and who gave them to a guy my father hadn’t seen since Christ was a corporal and who he just happened to run into outside the OTB. Over the years, my father had become increasingly fascinated with the workings of chance, and was every day more convinced that luck ruled the universe and kept him
un
lucky. Even when things like the odd fortuitous pair of Yankee tickets dropped into his lap, he liked examining the odds of such a thing happening, and when he was all finished studying the ins and outs of this particular good fortune, he’d go back to his original thesis about being unlucky, noting that real luck would have brought him Mets tickets. When the game was over he always insisted on heading back to Mohawk. He knew how to get from the stadium to the Thruway and was convinced that if I ever got him all the way downtown where I lived, he’d never find his way back.

“You can’t get lost,” I told him. “Just remember. The streets go one way, the avenues the other.”

“Thanks anyhow,” he said. “My luck, I’d be just as liable to get going wrong and end up in California, where I don’t know anybody but your mother.”

This was a hint for me to fill him in on how she was doing, whether she and F. William Peterson were still married.

“I never liked this town, even when I lived here,” he said each time he came to the city. “It’s full of people who don’t know any better.”

He did come all the way downtown once, about a year after the last of our meetings at Yankee Stadium. It was the week before Christmas, windy and wet and not quite cold enough to snow. I’d gotten home late and still had my overcoat on when the buzzer went off. On my way to see who it was, I ticked off half a dozen people who might be buzzing me at 7:30 on a Friday evening, and Sam Hall didn’t even make the list. There he was though, the top of his head recognizable three stories down.

He’d been drinking at Mickey’s across the street and waiting for me to turn up. “It’s a wonder anybody ever gets drunk in this town,” he said, even before hello, when I met him on the stairs half way up. “I ordered a bottle of beer and the bartender says two-fifty. I tell him I don’t want the whole six-pack, just the one. That’s good, he says, ’cause for two-fifty you just get the one.”

We shook hands.

“What on earth are you doing here?” I said.

“Visiting my son, if that’s all right.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s great. You took the bus?”

“Drove.”

“Where did you park?”

“Right out front.”

We were back in the apartment by then, so I looked down into the street. “Right there,” he pointed to the roof of a Plymouth Valiant.

“Amazing,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t move it.”

“This is all right,” he said, looking around my place. It was, in fact, the first decent apartment I’d had since coming to New York. “What’s it set you back?”

I told him.

He raised his eyebrows, but offered no comment. It figured, given the price of beer.

He’d planned to stay the weekend but by lunchtime the next day he was clearly itchy to get back to Mohawk. It depressed him that Manhattan barmaids didn’t like to be teased. He didn’t think there was much point in
being
a waitress if you couldn’t let yourself have a little fun at least. The bartenders were just as bad. They looked at him strangely when he slid onto a bar stool and staked his claim to it with a twenty-dollar bill. His was always the only bill of any denomination on the entire length of the bar,
which had been specially grooved to accommodate the tabs which were rung after each order and then arched before the patrons.

“Not me,” my father said. “If I’m tending this bar, I gotta see green before I go near the tap. Otherwise, you got guys drinking till closing and coming up light.”

He was sure of it, too. He’d be damned if there wasn’t at least one deadbeat at the bar even as we spoke.

“I come in, I drink a couple of beers, I get up to go to the john, I go in, I come back, I drink another beer, I gotta go again, right? Except this time I keep right on going out the door. There’s another spot around the block does things the same dumb way. Tomorrow night I go to a different part of town. By the time I run out of bars it’s 1990 and I can start all over again.”

He couldn’t wait to tell Roy Heinz about it when he got back home. Could I imagine that son of a bitch down here? He’d drink five hundred dollars worth of free booze in a week. A thousand probably.

My father took his time about it, but eventually the reason for his visit came out. Eileen had married during the summer, and for six months he’d been flirting with the idea of regret.

“Who’d she marry?” I said.

“That’s the worst part,” he said. “She had to go and find the laziest Polack in Mohawk County, as if all she needed was another mouth to feed. I told her so, too.”

“I’ll bet she appreciated it.”

“You never could tell her anything,” he admitted, “so why try?”

I shrugged.

“So why try?” he repeated.