The Risk Pool

it was easier to go along and because Tree was just as likely to have forgotten me, in which case I’d be all alone in claiming prior acquaintance.
    “I w-w-wisht I knew, Sammy. Honest to … Christ I do.”
    “I wish you did too, you pain in the ass,” my father said. “I got a problem or two myself right this minute.”
    Tree began to cry. “Jesus,” he said. “I know you do, Sammy. How do you think I feel asking. At a time like this, when you’re up sh … it crick yourself. I just w-w-wisht I knew what else to do.”
    My father slipped him twenty.
    “Jesus, Sammy,” he said, crying harder now. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
    “You could go away and let me talk to my kid a minute.”
    It was just the sort of suggestion that Tree was looking for, now that he had the money. You could tell. It was something he could do by way of repayment. “Y-you got it,” he choked. “Anything. Y-you got it.”
    He got halfway to the door and remembered something and came back. “I just w-wisht I knew what to do,” he told my father. “If I knew w-what to do, I’d be all right.”
    “I know, Tree,” my father said. “You and everybody.”
    Finally, the door closed behind him.
    “Wisht he knew what to do,” Harry grumbled from way down the counter. “Anybody with half a nut could tell him what to do. Go home to his wife and kids and bring his paycheck with him. Once in a fuckin’ while, anyhow.”
    “Love,” my father said. “When he’s got the bug, he’s not himself.”
    “Bullshit,” Harry said. “It’s the only time he
is
himself. Problem is, he’s got a shitty self.”
    “And no taste, to boot,” my father said.
    “Argh!” Harry concluded, spitting onto the surface of the hot grill, where the wet spot crackled, jumped, and disappeared. It was late afternoon and he’d be cleaning it in a few minutes anyway before the small dinner crowd came in wanting grilled rib steaks, on special today because they’d been in the cooler a while and were beginning to look as gray as the surface of the grill.
    “So,” my father said. “I guess you heard about my little problem.”
    He ran his hand over the stubble on his chin as if the little problem he was going to tell me about was the loss of his razor.
    “It’ll get straightened out here pretty quick,” he predicted. Since we had the place to ourselves, he got Harry to change a ten so we could play Liars.
    “How do you know?” I said.
    “Got to,” he said. “ ’Cause if I get screwed, some other people get it even worse. In another day or two they’ll figure that out, if they haven’t already. Once they do”—he lip-farted—“the whole thing disappears. It never happened even. That’s all. Simple.”
    “Simple,” I said.
    “You don’t think so?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    He had me down to my last bill already and wondering if I’d ever learn to play the game. I wondered if I’d be any better playing with my own money instead of his. Maybe not. Maybe I’d be worse.
    “Wussy come by?”
    I said he had. “We had hamburg steaks.”
    “He pay?”
    I said he had.
    “You could look all over hell and gone and never find a better one,” he said absently. My father didn’t object to the word “nigger,” but he wouldn’t use it on Wussy except when Wussy was there to hear it.
    “Eileen came by too,” I said, and before I thought, “and Mr. Peterson.”
    “And he told you where I was, right?”
    I could have kicked myself. “He wanted to know if I needed anything, mostly. Eileen wanted me to stay with her,” I added, hoping that this new subject would take.
    “Funny the way he turns up,” my father said, as if he considered it genuinely curious.
    I won two quick rounds while he thought about it.
    “I like him,” I said, though I hadn’t the night before.
    “You do,” he said.
    I shrugged.
    “You know what?” he said.
    “What?”
    “I don’t.”
    There was no point in asking him why, because if I did, he’d tell me and get himself all worked up in the process. Eventually he’d get around to his lawyer speech and it was a long one, absolutely to be avoided if possible.
    “Let me tell you something about all these guys,” my father said.
    “Four sixes,” I said, and settled in.
    Blessedly, Eileen stopped in for a minute on the way to work, interrupting our Liars game and the lawyer speech. When she left, we ate some dinner and tried to get the Liars going again, though it was clear that neither of