The Risk Pool

at Harry’s and my father settled up each week, letting me keep whatever Harry slipped me for bussing and washing dishes during the rush. When he was working, Sam Hall cared nothing for money, or when it was likely to run out, or how much he’d spent the night before, or where. He paid his bills when he thought about it, then forgot and paid them again, or remembered paying them when he hadn’t and offered to settle the matter outside. He kept no records.
    All in all, I preferred his attitude toward money to my mother’s. She had always watched it carefully, as if money possessed magical qualities, chief among them the ability to vanish. She had always planned her paychecks from the phone company a monthin advance and she never forgot a bill or when it was due. She even had a category in her ledger for “unexpected”—the run nylon stocking, the school trip to the Albany museum, the frozen water pipe in February. When nothing unexpected happened in September, she assumed two unexpected things would crop up in October, and over the course of a calendar year, she had “unexpected” pegged to within a few small dollars. She always congratulated herself on the fact that she had nothing to worry about, and wouldn’t have, as long as she continued to worry all the time.
    Though I admired my father’s nonchalance, his innocent faith that some fucking thing would give when it had to, I had to admit that I myself was more like my mother. I knew exactly what was in my savings account and I couldn’t understand my father’s unnatural lack of curiosity about my growing fortune. I had little faith in his “something’s gotta give” philosophy about bad times, and I delighted as I watched my money accumulate, not out of any abstract fondness for wealth, but rather from the conviction that the day was approaching when my father and I would be very glad to have it, and from the fear that no matter how much I saved, when that dark day arrived, we were unlikely to have as much as we needed. Not one fucking thing would give, whether it had to or not.
    So, when my father offered no objection, I continued to sell golf balls and even expanded my operation a little. Lying about finding balls in the woods gave me the idea that there might actually be some there, and it turned out that there were, though the pickings were slim in comparison with the pond. Still, come Saturday morning I always had between a hundred and two hundred balls for sale, and by Sunday noon I’d have another thirty or forty dollars for deposit. Plus the money from Rose’s. Plus the money from Harry. I was a money-making machine.
    Among my customers most Saturday mornings was Jack Ward, who always pulled the Lincoln over and got out, looking like an ad in a fashion magazine. When he was by himself, he seldom bought more than one or two of the best balls, which I took to be evidence of penury until I discovered he was one of the best golfers at the club. Sometimes, though, he had a young, blond-haired woman with him who talked him into buying her a half dozen or more. She was very pretty, with breasts that strainedagainst the fabric of her shirt, but I didn’t like her because she acted like a schoolgirl, talking what sounded like baby talk in a paper-thin voice. Right in front of Claude and me she’d slip her hand into Jack Ward’s pocket and coo, “Buy me …, okaaay?” The “buy me” routine was a regular feature until one morning she noticed Claude off to the side, admiring her absently and playing with himself, his face more suggestive of infinite sadness than lust. The sight of him unhinged her and she stepped back quickly as if from a snake. “That’s revolting,” she said in her natural voice, which put her at about thirty, as opposed to the seventeen she’d been aping. I think she would have bolted for the safety of the Lincoln if her hand hadn’t been caught in Jack Ward’s pocket.
    The second or third time he stopped, Jack Ward recognized me as someone he knew, someone who’d been in his house, though he seemed puzzled as to how that might have come about. I reminded him that it was I who had saved the day when his daughter had lost control of the car. He nodded then. “And only three hundred dollars worth of damage to the transmission, too.”
    “That’s good,” I replied seriously, imagining that this extravagant amount might actually constitute a good deal for repairs to a car as expensive as the Ward Lincoln, and not