Richard Russo - The Risk Pool

RICHARD RUSSOS
THE RISK POOL

Russos writing is straightforward, hard-boiled realismbrisk and evocative. The Risk Pool is a book whose simple truths live on, well after the final page is read.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Power, passion and poignancy: In the story of a father and son, Rick Russo reminds me of James T. Farrella James T. Farrell who has not forgotten how to hope.

Andrew M. Greeley

Russos realism is impeccable. His description of the depressed and restricted lives of Mohawks inhabitants is concrete and vivid.

Los Angeles Times

Russo writes in a prose style as seductive as spring: the novel has a vigorous pace, sharply witty dialogue and a liberal helping of hilarious scenes. The books depiction of a community fallen on hard times, its vividly delineated characters, and its sensitive portrayal of a boy bewildered by the conditions of his life and learning to adapt to hardship, neglect and a curious kind of off-hand love all pack an emotional wallop. In short, its as good a novel as we are likely to get this year.

Publishers Weekly

Russo writes with genuine passion and authority; his ear for dialogue is so acute that one can almost hear the characters speaking.

Chicago Tribune

A great book. I fell in love with the characters in this novel as I once fell in love with the characters in Garp.

Pat Conroy

BOOKS BY RICHARD RUSSO

Mohawk
Nobodys Fool
The Risk Pool
Straight Man
Empire Falls
The Whores Child
Bridge of Sighs
That Old Cape Magic

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1994

Copyright 1986, 1988 by Richard Russo

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover, by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1988.

A portion of this book appeared in slightly different form in Granta (Granta #19, Fall 1986).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russo, Richard, 1949
The risk pool/Richard Russo.1st Vintage contemporaries
ed.
p. cm.(Vintage contemporaries)
Originally published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc.,
New York, in 1988T.p. verso
eISBN: 978-0-307-80993-3
I. Title.
[PS3568. U812R57 1989] 89-40075
813.54dc20

The town of Mohawk, like its residents, is located only in the authors imagination.

v3.1

For Jim Russo
In Memoriam

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men, and he would have meant the same thing.

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

The author gratefully acknowledges support from Southern Connecticut State University and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, while he was working on this book. Special thanks also, for faith and assistance, to Nat Sobel, David Rosenthal, Gary Fisketjon, Greg Gottung, Jean Findlay and, always, my wife Barbara.

My father, unlike so many of the men he served with, knew just what he wanted to do when the war was over. He wanted to drink and whore and play the horses. Hell get tired of it, my mother said confidently. She tried to keep up with him during those frantic months after the men came home, but she couldnt, because nobody had been shooting at her for the last three years and when she woke up in the morning it wasnt with a sense of surprise. For a while it was fun, the late nights, the dry martinis, the photo finishes at the track, but then she was suddenly pregnant with me and she decided it was time the war was over for real. Most everybody she knew was settling down, because you could only celebrate, even victory, so long. I dont think it occurred to her that my father wasnt celebrating victory and never had been. He was celebrating life. His. She could tag along if she felt like it, or not if she didnt, whichever suited her. Hell get tired of it, she told my grandfather, himself recently returned, worn and riddled with malaria, to the modest house in Mohawk he had purchased with a two-hundred-dollar down payment the year after the conclusion of the earlier war hed been too young to legally enlist for. This second time around he felt no urge to celebrate victory or anything else. His wife had died when he was in the Pacific, but they had fallen out of love anyway, which was one of the reasons hed enlisted at age forty-two for a war he had little desire to fight. But she had not been a bad woman, and the fact that he felt no loss at her passing depressed and disappointed him. From his hospital bed in New London, Connecticut, he read books and wrote his memoirs while the younger men, all malaria convalescents, played poker and waited for weekend passes from the ward. In their condition it took little enough to get good and drunk, and by early Saturday night most of them had the shakes so bad they had to huddle in the dark corners of cheap hotel rooms to await Monday morning and readmission to the hospital. But theyd lived through worse, or thought they had. My grandfather watched them systematically destroy any chance they had for recovery and so he understood my father. He may even have tried to explain things to his daughter when she told him of the trial separation that would last only until my father could get his priorities straight again, little suspecting he already did. Trouble with you is, my father told her, you think you got the pussy market cornered. Unfortunately, she took this observation to be merely a reflection of the fact that in her present swollen condition, she was not herself. Perhaps she couldnt corner the market just then, but shed cornered it once, and would again. And she must have figured too that when my father got a look at his son it would change him, change them both. Then the war would be over.

The night I was born my grandfather tracked him to a poker game in a dingy room above the Mohawk Grill. My father was holding a well-concealed two pair and waiting for the seventh card in a game of stud. The news that he was a father did not impress him particularly. The service revolver did. My grandfather was wheezing from the steep, narrow flight of stairs, at the top of which he stopped to catch his breath, hands on his knees. Then he took out the revolver and stuck the cold barrel in my fathers ear and said, Stand up, you son of a bitch. This from a man whod gone two wars end to end without uttering a profanity. The men at the table could smell his malaria and they began to sweat.

Ill just have a peek at this last card, my father said. Then well go.

The dealer rifled cards around the table and everybody dropped lickety-split, including a man who had three deuces showing.

Deal me out a couple a hands, my father said, and got up slowly because he still had a gun in his ear.

At the hospital, my mother had me on her breast and she must have looked pretty, like the girl whod cornered the pussy market before the war. Well? my father said, and when she turned me over, he grinned at my little stem and said, What do you know? It must have been a tender moment.