The Risk Pool

through my teeth, staring straight ahead at the stupid control panel on the elevator wall, hating it blackly, hating the way it worked, hating him too. “Yes.”

13
    We got along all right, most of the time. During the week my father worked on a new road up in Speculator, and he was usually gone in the morning before I got up for school. He returned around seven, having stopped for a couple of quick ones on the way down the mountain. Then we’d eat hamburg steak dinnersacross the street at the Mohawk Grill where there were plenty of people my father knew to keep us company. He was held in high esteem by just about everybody there because he had a good-paying job outside of Mohawk, unlike the rest of the men, who worked, when they could get work, in the few remaining tanneries and glove shops. They also liked him because he was an easy touch and had a lousy memory. Seldom did our dinner go uninterrupted by some hangdog supplicant, hands shoved deep into baggy trouser pockets, hovering over our Formica table, making obligatory small talk before wondering if maybe, Sammy, you could spare ten, because things weren’t so hot and there wasn’t any food in the house for the kids and, Jesus, was this any way for an able-bodied man to have to live … in Mohawk … in fucking Mohawk, excuse the language in front of your boy, but is this any way for a man to live? Then my father, who did not own a wallet, would fish in the pocket of his work pants for the folded wad of bills he kept in no particular sequence—tens, ones, fives—and peel off a couple, sliding them across the table unobtrusively so that the other men in the diner didn’t have to know that it was a touch taking place and not just talk about the Giants, though they must have had a pretty good idea and some were probably thinking about their own prospects. Then the supplicant, always slightly more erect in posture for the infusion of cash, would tell my father to look for him come Friday, and my father would say sure, all right, Friday. He would often run into the same man later that night in Greenie’s or The Glove or one of the countless other twelve-stool bars where a ten-dollar bill bought a man-sized share of camaraderie and oblivion at fifteen cents a draft, forty-five cents a shot.
    If my father didn’t turn up by seven or so, I usually made myself a sandwich out of the small refrigerator and prepared for an evening alone. On such nights he would not careen in until after the bars closed. Then he would piss for about five minutes in the general vicinity of the commode before falling asleep on the sofa with his mouth wide open. He had traded in the ragged old couch for an equally suspect model with just as many miles, but which converted, by a tricky, complicated process, into a double bed. On late nights, however, he was unequal to a task requiring so much dexterity, and since comfort wasn’t the issue he usually decided the hell with it. Four hours or so later, the alarm having wound down to a feeble tinkle, he would jolt awake with a loud“Ah!” and go pee again, with even greater urgency and, blessedly, accuracy. Finding himself still dressed from the night before, there would be nothing to do but stumble down to the Mercury, trusting the cold wind to air him out and sober him up. It was asking a lot, even with the top down.
    On still other evenings we drove over to Eileen’s. Usually, we’d stop at a market and buy a big package of pork chops and a couple cans of creamed corn to take with us, and Eileen Littler would fry the chops in butter and oregano and mash a half dozen potatoes into huge white mounds. Eileen, it turned out, was a direct lineal descendant of Nathan Littler, the town father, and his fabled sister Myrtle, whose park Eileen’s small brown house sat at the edge of. The decline of the Littler family more or less paralleled that of Mohawk itself. Eileen excepted, the two dozen or so Littlers remaining in the county now lived, albeit marginally, on public assistance, which permitted them lives as full of leisure as their privileged ancestors. According to Eileen, who always held down at least two jobs and hadn’t much use for her relatives, they’d all inherited a lazy gene. Her own industry, however, did not prevent her from being equated with the rest of the Littlers, and she herself was viewed as an object lesson in moral decline.
    Right before the war, Eileen was said to have gone a little wild, and half a dozen