The Risk Pool

anyhow,” he said, a folded twenty materializing from his flannel shirt pocket.
    I said I was fine, really.
    “Now you’re finer,” he said, stuffing the bill in my own shirt pocket. “Nothing could be finer. Than to be in Caroliner.”
    If things weren’t strange enough, who should walk in right then but Eileen herself. She came right over and slipped onto the stool between me and Skinny Donovan, who gurgled but did not budge.
    “So,” she said. “You want to stay with me for a couple days?”
    “Why?” I said. “I’m all right.”
    “Just till your father gets back?”
    “Why?” I repeated.
    “Why not?” Eileen said, trying to sound jovial.
    I didn’t feel jovial. There were too many people who knew something I didn’t, and it was all too clear that they weren’t going to tell me. It wasn’t me, this time, either. Before, I had jumped to the wrong conclusion in the matter of my mother, but this was different. Then I had marveled at what great liars they all were, how well they’d concealed the truth. Now it turned out they were pretty pitiful at trying to pretend nothing was up.
    “Do you have money?” Eileen wanted to know, bending down for her purse. If Wussy hadn’t been there, I’d have said no. I was suddenly angry enough to take a hundred and spend it. There was my father’s convertible sitting out there in the street, and here we all were talking about him as if he’d left town for the weekend. All I could think about was what must have happened. I saw the poker table, my father leaning forward to draw in the pot, somebody pushing a chair back and standing up, like in westerns. Or somebody else raking in the pot and my father standing up. Somebody pulling a gun.
    Of course there were all sorts of places he could be. He could be in Las Vegas with Mike. They had gone before, gotten good and drunk and driven to the Albany airport. That made as much sense as anything, and it accounted for the car being out front. They would’ve taken Mike’s, and he wouldn’t have wanted me to know where he was going, either. I tried to picture him and Mike shooting craps in a big casino, but my imagination refused toconjure the scene. Instead I kept seeing him in a hospital bed, tubes everywhere, beneath an oxygen tent.
    Wussy paid for dinner and the three of us went outside, leaving Skinny where he was, with his head on the counter. The cold March wind tunneled up Main Street, and we hunched our shoulders against it. There was a light on in the living room of the Accounting Department. I remembered distinctly turning it off before we left. A shadow passed before the shaded window, then disappeared.
    Neither Eileen nor Wussy appeared to notice. Eileen was still talking to me, trying to convince me to come stay with her. I didn’t want to appear too anxious to get away from them, so I played it cool and just shrugged and waited for Eileen to get tired of talking to a blockhead. I saw the shadow three more times before Eileen observed that I couldn’t be anybody’s kid but Sam Hall’s, and Wussy said, “So long, Sam’s Kid. You know how to find me,” which I did, more or less. Finally, I said I thought I’d just do some homework and go to bed, and they gave up and drove off.
    About half a block up the street was a black Cadillac with big tail fins I’d never seen before, and I remembered the men who had come to Mohawk looking for my father years ago, and how he had hidden out until they left. I walked by the street entrance to our apartment and glanced in, then headed up the street, then back again, this time going in, quietly, so as not to rattle the glass. The shadow I’d seen in our apartment hadn’t looked like my father’s. It hadn’t moved right, but I couldn’t be sure. At the first landing I leaned over the rail and peered up into the darkness between the banisters. I didn’t see any movement and the stairs were quiet except for the creaking that registered my own weight.
    I fingered the keys in my pocket, recalling that I had one to Rose’s. If I was quiet, I could slip in there, open the door a crack and wait to see who came out. Whoever it was couldn’t stay in there forever. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good plan.
    I could tell her key by feel. The first thing Rose had done when she signed the lease was change all the locks, and her keys were different from the big, old-fashioned one that fit the door of the Accounting Department. On the other