The Risk Pool

critically. “Knees all scraped up …”
    “How the hell did I know we were going to blaze a trail?” my father said. “You cold?”
    “No,” I lied.
    Wussy snorted. “I think I saw blankets inside.”
    My father went to fetch them. “Your old man’s a rockhead,” Wussy observed again. “Otherwise, he’s all right.”
    He didn’t seem to need me to agree, so I didn’t say anything. He opened three cans of chili with beans into a black skillet and set it on top of the grate. Then he chopped up two yellow onions and added them. You couldn’t see much except the dark woods and the outline of the cabin. We heard my father banging into things and cursing inside. After a few minutes the chili began to form craters which swelled, then exploded. “Man-color,” Wussy said. “That’s what I am.”
    My father finally came back with a couple rough blankets. He draped one over me and threw the other around his own shoulders.
    “No thanks,” Wussy said. “I don’t need one.”
    “Good,” my father said.
    “And you don’t need any of this chili,” Wussy said, winking at me. “Me and you will have to eat it all, Sam’s Kid.”
    My father squatted down and inspected the sputtering chili. “I hate like hell to tell you what it looks like.”
    It looked all right to me and it smelled better than I knew food could smell. It was way past my normal dinner time and I was hungry. Wussy ladled a good big portion onto a plate and handed it to me. Then he loaded about twice as much onto a plate for himself.
    “What the hell,” my father said.
    “What the hell is right,” Wussy said. “What the hell, eh Sam’s Kid?”
    My father got up and went back into the cabin for another blanket. When he returned, Wussy said no thanks, he was doing fine, but didn’t my father want any chili? “You better get going,” he advised. “Me and the kid are ready for seconds.”
    We weren’t, exactly, but when he finished giving my father a pretty small portion, he ladled more onto my plate and the rest of the skillet onto his own.
    “I bet there’s a lot of shallow graves out here in the woods,” my father speculated, pretending not to notice there was no more chili whether he hurried up or not. “You suppose anybody would miss you if you didn’t come home tomorrow?”
    “Women, mostly,” Wussy said. “I feel pretty safe though. Mostly I worry about you. Anything happened to me, you’d starve before you ever located that worthless oil guzzler of yours.”
    “Your ass.”
    When I couldn’t eat any more, I gave the rest of my chili to my father, who looked like he was thinking of licking the hot skillet. “The kid’s all right,” Wussy said. “I don’t care
who
his old man is.”
    It was so black out now that we couldn’t even see the cabin, just a thousand stars and each other’s faces in the dying fire.
    Wussy blew the loudest fart I’d ever heard. “What color’s my skin?” he said, as if he hadn’t done anything at all.
    I had been almost asleep, until the fart. “Man-color,” I said, wide awake again.
    “There you go,” he said.
    I woke with the sun in my eyes next morning. There were no curtains on the cabin’s high windows. I was still dressed from the night before. My legs, all scratched from the long walk through the woods, felt heavy and a little unsteady when I stood up. I looked around for a bathroom, but there wasn’t any.
    My father and his friend Wussy were face down on the other two bunks. My father’s arms were coffee-colored, like Wussy’s, but his legs and back were fish-white. Wussy had taken the trouble to crawl under the covers, but my father lay on top. The cabin had been warm the night before, but it was chilly now, though my father didn’t seem aware of it. I was cold, and it made me really wish there was a bathroom. In the center of the small table was an empty bottle and a deck of cards fanned face up. They’d kept score in long uneven columns labeled N and S on a brown paper bag. The S columns were the longer ones, and the number 85 was circled at the top of the bag with a dollar sign in front of it. I had awakened several times during the night when one of them yelled “Gin!” or “You son of a bitch!” but I was too exhausted to stay awake. I watched the two sleepers for a while, but neither man stirred, so I went outside.
    The iron skillet, alive with bright green flies, still sat on the grate. There were so many flies, and they were so furious that their