The Risk Pool

was that the time he spent with me was the only time she could relax her vigilance, at least until school started in the fall. Often when we returned home, we’d find her deeply asleep in the big armchair that had been her husband’s. It faced the kitchen door and she would not wake up if we entered quietly. Then Claude would take a seat and watch his mother sleep and breathe, though this was too spooky for me, and I’d have to leave. I always wanted to get away before she woke up and saw her son sitting there looking at her from across the dark room, across the wide chasm of his experience and her imagination.

23
    My savings account continued to swell. Between the money I got from cleaning Rose’s and the cash Harry slipped me on Fridays and the golf balls I sold on weekends, I was loaded. Life was good. After dinner at the Mohawk Grill, my father would shoot a rack of pool with me at the pool hall before heading out to The Elms or tracking down a poker game. I had an immediate passion for the game and before long I could shoot pretty well. Not well enough to beat my father, but pretty well. I’d have stayed there in the pool hall all night if I’d been allowed to. Around eight o’clock, however, the place would begin to get jammed and the crowd would get rougher and my father would put up our cues before things really got cooking and the sticks got used to settle disagreements. It was a rare night that did not generate at least one fight in the pool room, and while most of the combatants were either too drunk or too inept to hurt each other much, bystanders were sometimes mangled hideously. My father said if it was just him, he’d let me stay and shoot to my heart’s content, but there was one thing he never wanted to do, and that was report to my mother that I’d been killed in the pool hall. I couldn’t blame him for that.
    He understood my passion though, and one Saturday afternoon when I returned from selling golf balls there was a pool table sitting in the middle of the apartment. My father was on his back, swearing up at its underbelly, trying to level the table through the sheer force of his obscenity. Wussy was there too, stretched out on the couch with a beer, clearly enjoying himself.
    “Howdy, Sam’s Kid,” he said. “Come over here and watch this.”
    A wrench appeared, airborne, missing Wussy by a fair margin, but not the rabbit ears on the television, which clattered to the floor.
    Wussy drained the rest of his beer, crushed the can, andbelched significantly. “When you finish with that,” he said, “you can fix the TV.”
    “What’s wrong with the TV?” came my father’s voice from under the table.
    “Nothing a master fixer like you couldn’t handle,” Wussy said.
    “Get your black ass over here a minute. Lift this table.”
    Wussy ignored him. “Well, Sam’s Kid, how’s the golf ball business?”
    That he knew about it was only mildly surprising. Wussy found out about most of what went on in Mohawk.
    “I hear they nailed your associate,” he said.
    I decided to play dumb. “Who?”
    “Who,” Wussy said. “Willie Heinz, who. Ankle fractured in about nine places. Totaled a brand new golf cart. Who.”
    I poured myself a soda and handed Wussy another beer.
    “You never heard of Willie Heinz, right?”
    “If I have to come out from under this table—” my father said.
    Wussy got up and lifted the big pool table effortlessly.
    “Don’t drop it, either,” my father said.
    “I should,” Wussy said. “Solve all
your
problems, right Sam’s Kid?”
    “Cocksucker,” my father muttered, apparently at the table. The legs were supposed to be adjustable.
    “Tells me not to drop it and then calls me names,” Wussy said.
    After a minute, my father crawled out from underneath and Wussy set the table down. Anybody could see it was cockeyed, but my father refused to believe it. Wussy set a ball in the center of the table and it rolled right into the corner pocket. “Perfect,” he said. “Shoot everything into that one.”
    “Cocksucker,” my father said. Then he looked at me as if the whole thing was my fault. I could tell they’d been at it a while. “Every time I fix it, it’s worse,” my father admitted.
    “Give up, why don’t you,” Wussy suggested. “Saw all four legs off, set the bastard on the floor. If the building don’t slope, you’re in business.”
    “Cocksucker,” my father said.
    “Lift it up a minute,” Wussy said. He never would have