The Risk Pool

agreed, then to me, “She speaks the language, doesn’t she?”
    “She does indeed.”
    “Bad night, amigo,” Robert said. “These particular dogs don’t seem to know who’s supposed to win.”
    “Blue Piniella,” I said.
    “Keep your voice down, for God’s sake,” Anita said.
    We watched the handlers parade the dogs to the post for the fourth race, and I took Robert’s chair when he went to get a bet down.
    “I hear you’re in the middle of a pretty amazing tailspin,” Anita said, not looking up from her legal pad.
    “These things happen,” I said, trying to affect world-weariness.
    “How bad is it?”
    I ran my fingers through my hair. “Something’s gotta give pretty soon, let’s put it that way.”
    I’d no sooner spoken the words than I felt a chill. It took me a minute to place them, to realize that I had summoned them from across a gulf of over a decade. It was that long since I’d seen my father. According to my mother he’d moved back to Mohawk, but she hadn’t seen him and didn’t know if it was true.
    “Robert says you’re trying to lose,” Anita said over the top of her reading glasses, and for some reason it pissed me off that she should say so. She herself looked like a cave dweller, her skin sallow, almost transparent, like a dusty moth’s wing. “He says you’re a classic case. He’s going to do a paper on you.” She raised her eyebrow significantly.
    Her husband came back then, so I surrendered his chair. “Who you got here?” he said.
    I told him I was letting this one alone.
    “Let them all alone and then you might have something, right?” he said.
    Anita made a face at him. “
Do
tell. What would
you
have?”
    “I have you,” Robert said, and I realized I had in fact stumbled into the middle of a marital spat. The subtlety of these things always surprised me. My father and mother had fought openly, their disagreements spilling out into the street or backyard. When married couples concealed their animosities in public, or tried to, it always threw me for a loop, and when the fourth race went off I was glad. I didn’t want to hear their next coded, civilized exchange.
    I also didn’t want to be the subject of Robert Crane’s thesis, so I strolled back to the little bar to mingle with the other desperate men who were waiting for some fucking thing to give. On my way I passed a table occupied by an affluent young couple who had gotten up and gone over to the rail to watch the race below under the yellow lights. It was probably their first time at the track and they’d left a twenty-dollar bill on the table. In all the commotion it would have been the easiest thing in a difficult world to lift it, put it down again on Blue Piniella’s sleak nose in the fifth, and slip the twenty back later in the evening after the dog won and paidoff. The next easiest would be to wait for Robert Crane to get up from the table to place his bets and put the touch on him. I’d pay him back tomorrow after I sold the Galaxie if Blue Piniella found a way to lose.
    But I didn’t do any of those things. Despite having slept all afternoon I was suddenly exhausted. Too tired to steal, to borrow, to cheer a long shot, to care much whether some fucking thing gave or whether it didn’t. So I just stood there and watched the small monitor above the bar as Blue Piniella broke from the gate a head in front of the pack and ran like the wind, wire to wire. He was beautiful, and I thought about his pure need to run, all the way back to my car.
    When I got home, sure enough, the telephone was ringing. It was just like my mother to call and call, to stay up all night calling if need be. I decided to tell her I’d been home the whole time and working too intently to bother answering. Make her feel guilty about interrupting. “Yes, what is it, for heaven’s sake?” I said into the receiver.
    “Ned?” the voice was female, distant and unrecognizable on the fuzzy long distance line. A Mohawk voice, but not my mother’s. “Ned Hall?”
    “Who is this?” I said.
    “This
is
Ned, isn’t it?” A pause. “I wouldn’t have called except it’s important,” Eileen Littler assured me. “It’s about Sam … your father.”

30
    I tried my best, all the way across country, but it was hard to imagine my father a drunk. But then it was hard to imagine my father.
    Ten years was a long time. I hadn’t seen him since the late spring afternoon he and Wussy had delivered the pool table.