The Risk Pool

as faithful to me as any mutt you’d ever save from starvation. At his mother’s insistence, he wore turtleneck sweaters to hide the white scars left by the rope. Not that Claude wasn’t amenable. Since the afternoon he’d strung himself up from the ramada, he’d become amenable to everything. Mostly he just sat in front of thetelevision, staring at it blankly, except for Ben Cartwright and
Bonanza
, which struck some kind of chord within him and sometimes made him cry. Otherwise, he did whatever his mother told him. If I came over to visit, he’d follow me out the door and down the street. In the old days, the first thing he would have done was trip me, or shove me in a snowbank, or declare a race after getting a good four-step running lead. Now he just heeled to my command, abstracted, vague about whatever was on our (my) agenda.
    The only thing that ever attracted his attention was a blue Thunderbird. Whenever he saw one, Claude would want to follow or, if it was parked, wait beside it. His father had bought a new one to replace the Pontiac station wagon just before his son’s attempted suicide and taken it with him when he abandoned them a week or so after the doctors assured him and Mrs. Schwartz that their son would live. It was a terrible irony that blue Thunderbirds were popular that year. I knew of at least three owned by people in Mohawk, and I always had a devil of a time convincing Claude when he spotted one parked that he shouldn’t wait there by the curb for his father to come out.
    Actually, Claude wasn’t that bad a sentinel. He stationed himself on the fairway edge of the pond where he could see well in both directions. When anyone approached the tee, he clapped two flat rocks together underwater, an unmistakable, sometimes earsplitting signal. Now and then he’d give the signal if he just got lonesome for me, or lost track of my bubbles, or thought I’d been down too long. He always looked enormously relieved when I surfaced, as if he suspected that I had been visiting the same dark place he had visited at the end of his rope. I think I may have been the only person he told about it, what it had felt like. It was spooky listening to him explain in half a dozen words with that hoarse whisper his voice had become. For some reason, I had not imagined that he had gone blind there, but he said he had, almost immediately, with his eyes wide open. Other than suffocation, he’d felt no sensation, except in his toes, as if, even in his semiconscious state, something in him remembered that his life depended on them. We never talked about why he had done it. I figured he’d say, if he felt like it, without provocation, the way he’d rolled down his turtleneck one day to show me. But he never did say anything about his reasons, as if these might be even more hideous than the livid white flesh.
    To say that he was a changed boy would be less accurate thanto suggest that the Claude who’d got me to barf Oreos died at the end of the rope that afternoon, leaving behind another person entirely, this one without defenses. He no longer cared to compete with me or anyone. There were no more arm wrestling contests, sprints or eating tournaments, no more sarcastic remarks about my being a wimp. When pretty girls were around he stared at them forlornly, his hands in his pockets, working there but somehow without conviction, as if he’d lost the capacity to imagine pleasure.
    All in all, I preferred the old Claude, asshole though he had been. I doubt if I’d have befriended the new Claude if it hadn’t been for his mother, who seemed to take my visits as personal favors, medicinal in their effect. In fact, she looked about as forlorn as her son, and she never asked questions about where we were going or where we’d been when we returned after dark. She either trusted me completely or had concluded that I was the least of the dangers her son faced. I don’t think she ever discussed with anyone his attempted suicide or the sudden disappearance of Claude Sr. I’m not sure they even talked to each other. Whenever I visited, I never seemed to be interrupting anything, and I often got the feeling that there no longer
was
anything in that house to interrupt except silence. They often gave the appearance of having been watching each other for hours.
    It finally dawned on me that Claude’s mother was waiting for him to try it again, and that part of her gratitude to me for taking the boy away for a few hours