Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
The Risk Pool

The Risk Pool

Titel: The Risk Pool Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Richard Russo
Vom Netzwerk:
suggested this an hour ago. He always let my father go ahead with whatever he was trying to do until there was something in the tone of his “cocksucker” that suggested he was ready for help.
    When Wussy disappeared under the table, my father winkedat me. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said. “I got a pretty fair grip on this thing. If it starts to go, I’ll shout.”
    But Wussy was through already and when my father set the table down, it looked about right. Wussy took a ball from one of the leather pouches and set it in the middle of the table, where it stayed. Then my father rolled it slow and we all bent to watch its miraculously straight path to the green bumper.
    “There,” my father said, cuffing me. “You got a pool table. Don’t tell your mother.”
    If ever there was an ideal place for a pool table, the Accounting Department was that place. The central cavernous room we lived in was far too large for us, the sofa and television taking up only a small portion, leaving the rest bare and conducive to lonely echoes. The table was a big tournament-sized one, but there was still plenty of room on all sides to circle and brandish a cue. The problem with pool tables outside of pool halls is that there’s never really enough room to play. There’s usually some basement post that makes one part of the table inaccessible, or a wall that’s too close, requiring a short cue wielded at a sixty-degree angle. But our bowling alley of a flat was perfect.
    The table itself was old, but in wonderful condition. I learned later that my father had had his eye on it for some time, ever since he learned that the man who owned it had gone into the hospital. The fellow’s wife had always hated having the table in her home and was contemplating its disposal when my father, having read the obituary column in the
Mohawk Republican
, appeared in their long drive with a pickup truck offering to cart it off for free. The widow, who was on her way to the funeral, agreed to let my father take it, provided he could get it out of the house before she returned from the cemetery. She and her husband had argued over the table for years and he’d told her flatly that she’d get rid of it over his dead body. It was going to stay right the hell where it was until he was in the ground, he’d boasted, and it occurred to her now that if my father carted it off right away, it would rankle her husband in the afterlife.
    That night, when we finished eating hamburg steaks at Harry’s, my father pushed his plate away, studied me shrewdly and said, “Well?”
    “It’s a great table,” I said, guessing wrong, as usual. “Thanks.”
    “Don’t change the subject,” he said. “What’s this about you selling golf balls?”
    Confronted so directly, there wasn’t anything to do but tell him, so I did. I told him that during the week I scoured the woods that lined the fairways, that if I worked hard I could usually find a couple dozen balls there, that I didn’t figure they belonged to anybody since their owners had stopped looking for them, that I was providing a public service by reselling them so cheap. What I told him had just the right amount of truth to it, enough to sound plausible, not enough to worry him. I didn’t see where the woods were so different from the pond, or why the pro shop had any more right to sell other people’s lost golf balls than I did. Not telling the truth about precisely how I came to have the balls actually clarified the legal and ethical issues, it seemed to me, and therefore it wasn’t what a reasonable person would call lying. I knew I was vulnerable on the issue of being on the private golf course in the first place, but I didn’t think my father would raise it. He was a born trespasser who believed he had a right to go anywhere he pleased in a free country. In his opinion, signs that warned people to keep out did their job by keeping
most
people out, and the owners of the said property hadn’t a right to expect much more. Anybody that wanted
him
to stay out would have to tell him so personally.
    Anyway, my fabric of lies and half-truths had the desired effect, though I made a mental note, after telling my father that I found the golf balls in the woods, to leave my snorkel and fins over at Claude’s. He never asked me how much money I was making or what I did with it, so I was left to conclude that it didn’t matter to him that I was becoming a wealthy man. I charged most of my lunches

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher