The Risk Pool

1
    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. “He’ll 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 couldn’t, because nobody had been shooting at her for the last three years and when she woke up in the morning it wasn’t 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 don’t think it occurred to her that my father wasn’t celebrating victory and never had been. He was celebrating life. His. She could tag along if she felt like it, or not if she didn’t, whichever suited her. “He’ll 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 he’d 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 he’d 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 hotelrooms to await Monday morning and readmission to the hospital. But they’d 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 couldn’t corner the market just then, but she’d 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 father’s ear and said, “Stand up, you son of a bitch.” This from a man who’d gone two wars end to end without uttering a profanity. The men at the table could smell his malaria and they began to sweat.
    “I’ll just have a peek at this last card,” my father said. “Then we’ll 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 who’d 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.
    Not that it changed anything. Six months later my grandfather was dead, and the day after the funeral, for which my fatherarrived late and unshaven, my mother filed for divorce, thereby losing in a matter of days the two men in