The Risk Pool

in the end my father was convicted of a misdemeanor and given a suspended sentence. Charges of transporting stolen property were dropped, and it was entered into the record that the contraband had been placed in the trunk of the car my father was driving by unknown, mysterious forces. He was even slipped a little something by the prosecuting attorney to help with the fine, and the men my father had protected slipped him a little something more for being a sport about spending the night in jail.
    “I been there before,” he shrugged, but admitted that the money would come in handy, since he was already mired in the lowest depths of the insurance risk pool and the accident was going to play hell with his rates. “I don’t give a shit about me,” he explained, “but I got a kid to support.”
    Losing my savings served me right, I had to admit. Having myself stolen, I considered myself, with some justification, a thief. And if there was some sort of cosmic accounting (did we not live in the Accounting Department?) at work in the universe, then I wasn’t square yet, for while I had never totaled up all that I’d copped from Klein’s I knew it had to be more than the four hundred dollars my father used to extricate himself from his “little problem” and never gotten around to paying back. Not only that, I knew I didn’t have much cause to be miffed at him, because he paid for a lot of things, like my tab over at Harry’s.
    What got me thinking and worrying, though, was that he had apparently known about my savings account all along. I wondered if he was surprised when he got out of jail and found out how much I had, or if he’d been monitoring my progress all along. One thing was clear—he had been way ahead of me, like always. He’d known and he’d not let on that he knew.
    And it wasn’t like I’d never been warned. According to mymother, Sam Hall had always been slippery with money. After the war, during that first frantic year when they were going to the track all summer long, she’d leave him in line at the two-dollar window and visit the ladies’ room. When she came out, he’d be just finishing up and he’d hand her the tickets to keep warm when they got back to their seats. When the race was over and the two or three tickets my mother held were officially worthless, he’d say not to worry, he’d held on to the winning ticket himself. And there between his thumb and forefinger would be a ten-dollar winner.
    The way such tickets occasionally materialized did not have the reassuring effect on my mother that he might have hoped, however, because she was smart enough to realize that the ticket’s existence had broader, unsettling implications. Somehow, she realized, my father had slipped out of the two-dollar line in favor of the always shorter ten-dollar one, then returned to where she’d left him so she wouldn’t be suspicious. She discovered that in addition to the pocket that held the tickets he admitted to, my father had other pockets, and these sometimes contained larger wagers she was kept ignorant of, which meant that she never knew where they stood. On a night when they appeared to be winning, according to the tickets he let her cash, my father’s other pockets might be bulging with losing tickets.
    She tried to regulate how much money they brought to the track so that she’d know when it was gone, but often he would have more than he admitted when they left the house and he sometimes borrowed from friends once there. Putting the touch on people was something he was so adept at that the transaction was sometimes accomplished right under her nose without her suspecting a thing until later when she made him explain how they’d lost so much. The more she tried to keep tabs, the more sneaky my father became until, in the end, the track lost its appeal for her and she stopped accompanying him, which disappointed my father greatly. She wasn’t able to make him understand that she never knew which horse to root for, because she never knew where their real money rode. “I want you to tell me everything,” she insisted. “If you keep things from me, I’m lost.
We’re
lost.”
    I don’t know what his response to that was, but I can guess what his solution would have been. He would have wanted her to join him in the game—to have something secreted away in the insidepocket of her own blazer, something to surprise
him
with. You see, what I worried about most after he’d wiped me out