The Risk Pool

was wearing a thin t-shirt, shorts, sneakers. “Course, you aren’t either. You planning to attend a dance in those shoes?”
    “I didn’t have time to change,” my father shrugged.
    “Where the hell were you?”
    My father started to answer, then looked at me. “Someplace.”
    “Oh,” the man called Wussy said. “I been there. Hey, Sam’s Kid, you know what a straight flush is?”
    I shook my head.
    “His name is Ned.”
    “Ned?”
    My father nodded. “I wasn’t consulted.”
    “How come?”
    “I wasn’t around might have had something to do with it.”
    “Where were you?”
    “Someplace,” my father said. “Which reminds me.”
    We were speeding along out in the country and there was asmall store up ahead. We pulled in next to the telephone booth. My father closed the door behind him, but I could still hear part of the conversation. My father said she could kiss his ass.
    When he got back in the car, my father looked at me and shook his head as if he thought maybe
I’d
done something. “Don’t lose that,” he said. I was still fingering the spider gadget.
    “As long as we’re stopped,” Wussy said, “what do you say we put the top up?”
    “What for?” my father said.
    Wussy tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up. The sun had disappeared behind dark clouds, and the air had gone cool.
    “Your ass,” my father said, jerking the car back onto the highway.
    Ten minutes later the skies opened.
    “Your old man is a rockhead,” Wussy observed after they finally got the top up. It had stuck at first and we were all soaked. “No wonder your mother don’t want nothing to do with him.”
    It was nearly dark when we got to the cabin. We had to leave the convertible at the end of the dirt road and hike in the last mile, the sun winking at us low in the trees. We followed the river, more or less, though there were times when it veered off to the left and disappeared. Then after a while we would hear it again and there it would be. Wussy—it turned out that his name was Norm—led the way, carrying the rods and most of the tackle, then me, then my father, complaining every step. His black dress shoes got ruined right off, which pleased Wussy, and the mosquitoes ate us. My father wanted to know who would build a cabin way the hell and gone off in the woods. It seemed to him that anybody crazy enough to go to all that trouble might better have gone to a little more and poured a sidewalk, at least, so you could get to it. Wussy didn’t say anything, but every now and then he’d hold on to a wet branch and then let go so that it whistled over the top of my head and caught my father in the chin with a thwap, after which Wussy would say, “Careful.”
    I was all right for a while, but then the woods began to get dark and I felt tired and scared. When something we disturbed scurried off underfoot and into the bushes, I got to thinking about home and my tree and my mother, who had no idea where I was. It occurred to me that if I let myself get lost, nobody would everfind me, and the more I thought about it, the closer I stuck to Wussy, ready to duck whenever he sent a branch whistling over my head.
    “I hope you didn’t bring me all the way out here to roll me, Wuss,” my father said. “I should have mentioned I don’t have any money.”
    “I want those shiny black shoes.”
    “You would, you black bastard.”
    “Nice talk, in front of the kid.” A branch caught my father in the chops.
    “What color is he, bud?” my father poked me in the back.
    I was embarrassed. My mother had told me about Negroes and that it wasn’t nice to accuse them of it. Wussy’s skin was the color of coffee, at least the way my mother drank it, with cream and sugar. “I don’t know,” I said.
    “That’s all right,” my father said. “He’s none too sure either.”
    And then suddenly we were out of the trees and there was the cabin, the river gurgling about forty yards down the slope.
    Wussy tossed all the gear inside and started a fire in a circle of rocks a few feet from the ramshackle porch. When it got going good, he brought out a big iron grate to put over it. With the sun down, it had gotten cool and the fire felt good. My father fidgeted nearby until Wussy told him he could collect some dry sticks if he felt like it. “You could have brought a pair of long pants and a jacket for him at least,” he said.
    “Didn’t have a chance,” my father said.
    “Look at him,” Wussy said