The Risk Pool

concrete floor, than have it roll harmlessly up to the precipice, quiver there a moment before giving in to gravity.
    No thirteen-year-old but me, that is. For this is precisely the game I learned to play on the table my father and Wussy set up in our living room. After the Mohawk Fair in September, the chill winds my grandfather had known so well made a memory of the summer of 1960. It was then too cold to dive for golf balls or hang out at the Sacandaga Marine. I entered eighth grade, my last at Nathan Littler Junior High. When school got out I went home and shot rack after rack of pool feeling peaceful and glad. Sometimes I let Claude come with me because he had become even more of an object of ridicule after it became widely known why he always wore turtlenecks and talked in a hoarse whisper. He shot pool like he did everything else now, listlessly, expecting defeat, ensuring it by not concentrating or missing on purpose (no one could really have been so bad) on those rare occasions when he found himself in a position to win. Not only was I far too good for Claude, I was becoming too good for almost everybody, including my father, anindifferent pool shooter who could never keep his mind on the game, sometimes could not remember whose turn it was, having been lured into a nearby conversation at the bar. He was a little better when he played for money, but not much. After a while I could beat him easily, though I seldom did, afraid that he would intuit from my growing mastery that I was neglecting my studies, which I was. I continued to read voraciously, almost everything except that which had been assigned, and years later I was told that I occasioned many an argument among my teachers, some of whom claimed I was a brilliant underachiever, others that I was just another homegrown militant moron. I don’t remember coming to any conclusion about my teachers at all.
    Pool I thought about constantly, seeing in my mind’s eye during civics class the brightly colored balls rolling straight and true over green felt. I played hundreds of imaginary games, mapping strategies, examining contingencies, discovering character flaws and weaknesses in my imaginary competitors. I stopped playing in public, not wanting anybody to know how good I was getting, but playing sometimes into the early morning hours when my father stayed out, bolting for bed only when I heard him coming on the stairs below. I had no goal in mind, no plan to check my progress by playing local studs, no need to boast. Playing was enough, and the table drew me like a beautiful woman, satisfying me, I’m ashamed to admit, completely.
    When the old woman who had let my father and Wussy cart off the table died a few short months after her husband and the beneficiaries to her estate discovered the table missing, they tried to force my father to give it back, claiming he had duped a senile old woman into believing the table worthless. They believed it to be worth upwards of a thousand dollars. My father told them they could go fuck themselves, then hired F. William Peterson to tell them the same thing, later refusing to pay the lawyer’s fee. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to surrender the table. Tria Ward, away at a private girl’s school in New England, I thought about seldom, and as the long gray Mohawk winter settled in, my world was lit by the hot bare bulb that dangled from the high ceiling directly above the table’s smooth green lawn and buffed mahogany.
    That winter promised to be nip and tuck, like all my father’s winters. He got himself laid off, as was his custom, around Thanksgivingand signed up for unemployment the next day. After a few weeks the checks started coming and it looked like we’d be all right until spring. I
knew
I would, but my father was always a question mark because his habits never changed, even when his income did. If anything, not working was the double whammy where Sam Hall was concerned, because he not only didn’t have as much money, but even more time to discover uses for it. Once the leather shops started laying off after the holidays he didn’t have to go looking for a poker game. They were everywhere, the only visible sign of a fluid economy in town, if you didn’t count the half-dozen downtown gin mills and the Mohawk Grill, where Harry sold little but coffee, though he sold a great deal of that at a dime-a-cup clear profit. Most of the stores along Main closed at two or three in the