The Risk Pool

side of the frozen glass, whoever had let himself into our apartment was pacing, curiously unconcerned, it seemed to me, about the sound of his footfalls.When I turned the key in Rose’s door and the lock thunked audibly, the shadow in our apartment stopped pacing, but made no move toward the door. After a minute, it resumed again.
    I don’t know why I didn’t duck into the salon. Maybe, in the back of my mind I was wondering why whoever was in our apartment had the light on. Somebody wanting to surprise my father would have left it off. And maybe the more I watched the figure pace, the more I listened to its impatient heavy footfalls, the more certain I was that I recognized it. (Lord knows I should have.) Leaving the door to Rose’s ajar so that I could beat a retreat in there if I had to, I faced the door to our apartment and turned the brass knob.
    Inside stood F. William Peterson.

25
    Naturally, I blamed him. F. William Peterson was just the sort of person you took things out on if he happened to be handy. I remember understanding, when I saw him standing there in the middle of the room, why my father had beaten him up in the parking lot so many years ago. You’d kick him for the same reason you’d kick a faithful dog that didn’t know any better than to keep its cold, wet nose out of your crotch when you’d had the kind of day that diminishes a human being’s capacity for fundamental decency.
    He had come to tell me what nobody else would, and I hated him even more blackly than the liars. Hated him for the way he sat me down as if I were a little boy and told me not to think badly of my father just because maybe he’d done something wrong, just because he was in jail. I hated him for making the news bearable, for reminding me that even good people sometimes did bad things. It didn’t mean they didn’t love us. That I shouldn’t worry too much anyway, because if F. William Peterson was right, andhe thought he was, things were going to start looking up for me very soon, and I didn’t want to waste my time being depressed when I should be preparing for the good times. I could tell that he would have liked to put his arm around my shoulder like I was
his
son, though he must have guessed that I would have none of that. When he was finally finished, when there wasn’t anything else he could think of to say and we were facing each other, I drove my hands deep into my pockets to prevent him from offering one of his.
    “He’ll tell you about it,” F. William Peterson said. “He should be the one, not me. I don’t think they’ll be able to hold him more than forty-eight hours.”
    The card he left me, with his office and home phone numbers on it, I tore to shreds as soon as the door closed behind him. It reached the snowy sidewalk below before he did. A block and a half up Main Street was City Hall, which contained the jail where my father was. From the front windows of the Accounting Department you could just see it if you turned out the lights and put your nose to the dark, cold glass. In fact, because of the angle and the thickness of the glass, it looked right next door, close enough to touch.
    If F. William Peterson imagined that my father was going to have a rough time explaining to me about why he’d been thrown in jail, he still had a lot to learn about my father. Much to everybody’s surprise he was out the next day. I’d skipped school and spent the day here and there, imagining that strangers I passed on the street could tell by the look of me that my father was locked up. I came home about the same time I normally did and noticed that the Mercury wasn’t sitting at the same angle in the snowbank, which meant that it had been driven and returned. Which meant that my father was a free man again. I found him right across the street drinking coffee at Harry’s.
    “Hello, Buster,” he said when he looked up and saw me there. “You gonna sit down or what?”
    I took the stool next to his. Tree was on the other side of him, looking hangdog. If he noticed me come in, or noticed my father notice, he made no sign. “I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I just w-w-wisht I knew what to do.”
    “Say hello to Tree,” my father said. As I’ve mentioned, SamHall wasn’t much on introductions, but there were certain people he introduced me to all the time and could never be convinced, even when both parties protested, that we’d ever laid eyes on each other. I said hello to Tree because