The Risk Pool

afternoon on weekdays to conserve heat, and the snowbanks grew so high that only the heads of people on the opposite side of the street were visible. My father’s convertible, its rag top up for the season, he refused to park anywhere except in front of Klein’s, and he left it at increasingly crazy angles, the passenger-side wheels two or three feet higher up the bank than those on the driver’s side. One night in January there was a thaw and when we came down to the street in the morning a crowd was gathered around my father’s car, which was balanced precariously atop a fire hydrant that had been invisible beneath the snowbank the night before when my father had come home. It was barely visible even now, its yellow top wedged in behind the convertible’s right front wheel. By that night we were famous, a picture of the car gracing the front page of the
Mohawk Republican
. My father had me stand next to the convertible with my arm extended, so that it looked for all the world like I was holding the car up with one hand.
    For a while he tended bar at The Elms on weekends and Mike’s night off, but then he stopped doing that and we didn’t go out there for a while. During the winter Mike’s business tailed off because people hated getting stranded way the hell and gone out there, two whole miles from Mohawk, when they could just as easily get stranded at Greenie’s or some other place in town. I suspected, however, that the real reason was that my father and Eileen were on the outs. The only thing he would say about it was that he couldn’t take being around Numb Nuts. There had to be more to it, though, because Drew Littler was seldom home. Since wrecking his bike, he’d turned eighteen and dropped out of school and become even more morose, hanging out at the poolhall all hours where he bragged about knowing how to hot-wire cars whenever he needed transportation. He was theoretically saving up for a new bike by shoveling snow and doing odd jobs that, according to my father, even a dummy couldn’t fuck up. He didn’t have much luck though, even with foolproof employment. When my father got him a job shoveling out the parking lot of a hardware store over on Union, Drew threw a shovelful of hard-packed snow through the second-story window and got canned.
    That night Eileen met the three of us (Wussy was along) at the back door on our way in. Drew was at the small kitchen table eating a long Italian roll he’d stuffed with ham and cheese and everything else he could find in the refrigerator.
    “Don’t start on him,” Eileen warned my father.
    But my father had been steaming ever since he’d heard, and there was no stopping him, at least not right away. “Put that sandwich down a minute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
    Drew kept eating.
    “First-floor window I can see,” my father said, standing over the boy. “A mistake. A dumb mistake, but … a mistake. Dumb for anybody else, normal for you. But how the fuck could you throw a block of ice through the second-floor window and sit there and tell me it was a mistake?”
    “I didn’t say nothin’ to you,” Drew said.
    This was true. My father had been anticipating the exchange all the way over in the car, figured that Drew would claim it was an accident, but had forgotten to wait for the boy to say it.
    “You’re telling me you did it on purpose? You threw a block of ice through a window on purpose?”
    “I ain’t telling you shit,” Drew said.
    “I wouldn’t either,” Wussy said. “I wouldn’t explain to nobody who parks on top of fire hydrants.”
    “Bullshit,” my father said, surprised by Wussy’s disloyalty, despite its predictability.
    “Bullshit yourself,” Wussy said. “Anybody didn’t know better would swear he was your kid brother.”
    My father looked at each of them, saw that he was clearly outnumbered, shook his head and went back outside. In a minute we heard him shout, so we all crowded at the window to see what was up. He was standing in the middle of the drive and he had a shovelful of snow, which I thought for a minute he was going to toss at us. Instead he flipped it gently to the top of the snowbank.“I’ll do it once more, Zero,” he said. “Watch carefully. Even you can master this.”
    One afternoon in early March, when the snow had turned as gray as the low sky and the weathered buildings along Main, I came home from school and was surprised to find the apartment empty. My father’s