The Risk Pool

us felt much like it. Sitting there in Harry’s for so long gave me the idea that maybe we were waiting for somebody, though I couldn’t think who. Eventually, we left.
    Out in the street a thaw had begun, the temperature having actually risen since late afternoon, and water was running beneath the gray snowbanks along the gutter.
    “I wish I could have done it some other way,” my father said, “but I had to let you help out.”
    “Help out how,” I said, unaware that I’d done anything.
    I had though.
    “We’ll get you straightened around, don’t worry.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Okay.”
    “I had that figured for your college,” he said. “So you won’t go through life a dummy.”
    The next day, on the noon hour, I cut lunch at school and ran downtown to the bank to find out how bad it was. My favorite teller got to break the news, and he looked pretty guilty explaining the bank’s policy with regard to minors. I was wiped out.
    In the end, things turned out pretty much the way he predicted, though it was years later, when I came back to Mohawk from the university, after a six-year absence, that I heard the story, overheard it in a bar actually, where my father was. I was the only one in the bar who’d never heard the story before.
    “Simple. Anybody coulda done it. My son was all of twelve,” hesaid, getting my age wrong, as usual (I was nearly fourteen), “and he coulda done it. The car’s out back of City Hall, right there in the parking lot. Somebody gives you a set of keys and a map. Then you drive the car is all. You get to where you’re going, you park the car, go sit in a bar and wait for your ride home.”
    Simple. You didn’t know what was in the trunk and you didn’t want to know. All you knew was that it was worth a couple hundred to somebody to have you drive it. If it was something really bad, it would have been worth a couple hundred more, so you’re not that worried.
    Simple, except that it had to snow like a bastard and he’d run into a roadblock at the entrance to the Thruway. Nobody was being let on without chains. My father had no idea whether there were chains in the trunk and wasn’t about to open it and find out. Never mind, he told the trooper. I’ll make the trip tomorrow.
    It wasn’t easy getting out of line at the Thruway entrance, but he’d have made it if not for the standard transmission, which he knew how to drive, but wasn’t used to. Trying to pull away in third instead of first, he’d stalled, then couldn’t get the engine to turn over. There was nothing to do then but sit there a few minutes and listen to the drivers behind him blow their horns. Nothing but roll down the window and give them all the finger. By the time he got the car started again, some of the drivers behind him had started to go around, and when he popped the car into gear it lurched forward just in time to clip the rear end of one of the passing cars, separating from its body the rear fender, which folded neatly and drove with an eerie screech up into the radiator fan of the car my father was driving, stalling him again. Even then, things might have been all right if the driver of yet another car, also trying to pass, hadn’t seen the collision, braked himself into a skid and sluiced sideways through the fresh snow until he came to rest with a barely audible thump against the rear of my father’s car. The impact was so slight that my father was not even sure he’d been hit, and the snow on the back window prevented him from seeing that the impact had popped his trunk open as cleanly as if a key had been inserted.
    It had taken ten minutes to get everything straightened out. My father exchanged license numbers with the two other drivers, got the fender extracted from the radiator, chatted with a helpful young trooper and even offered to get him Giant football tickets. My father was about to drive off when the trooper said, “Not likethat,” and went over to close the trunk that my father, during the entire conversation, had not noticed yawning open like an invitation to the penitentiary. “Goodnight, Irene,” my father said to the man he was swapping stories with, the irony, the tragedy of the whole escapade still fresh after a decade. So much for simple.
    The good news was that my father knew enough about the whole deal to implicate a cop and suggest a thing or two about a couple of city councilmen. F. William Peterson handled the out-of-court negotiations skillfully and