The Risk Pool

was, ironically, what he must have thought of me for keeping my money a secret from him, or trying to. At the very least, he must have concluded that I did not trust his judgment, which of course was true, though hardly the inference I would have wished him to draw. But now I don’t think that ever occurred to him, or if it did, I don’t think he minded my reluctance to confide. And I don’t think it would have pleased him for me to be so foolish as to trust him completely.
    I had the good sense not to dwell on my misfortune or consider myself unlucky. The A&P, along with one of the seven remaining glove shops, had closed permanently that winter, putting another fifty or so men out of work and making the Mohawk Grill even more crowded with dejected coffee drinkers. My father would be going back to work on the road soon, and I was still employed. I kept my old savings account and continued to add to it. Ten dollars a week. The rest I put in a new savings account in a small bank way out by the marina and made sure they sent us no monthly statement.
    When the weather started warming up and the streets began to run wet with water from the still high snowbanks, there was nobody to tell me not to get my bike out and ride around Mohawk, so I did. Riding the bike felt both good and bad. Good, because it made me the envy of all the younger kids who upon seeing me went home to beg their sensible parents to haul their bikes up out of the cellar, to no avail, for another month or so. Good also because there are few things better than riding a bike after a long winter. A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of song birds, the first bright tulip bud. Still, there was something wrong with the bike that year. During the winter months it had occurred to me that a car was more suitable transportation for someone like myself, who’d be entering Mohawk High in September, and it occurred to me well after the fact that the money my father took was money I had been saving for a car. My father wasn’t just a thief, he was a car thief.
    So was Drew Littler, I discovered. The only reason I knew was that he asked me if I wanted to be one too. The idea was to sneakover to Kings Road where the expensive houses were, hot-wire somebody’s Cadillac, take it for a joy ride, and then park it in the Mohawk River. It was part of a new, intensified, comprehensive “Screw the Money People” campaign he had in mind. Swiping and/or destroying their transportation was a form of vengeance that particularly appealed to Drew since losing his motorcycle, and he bragged to me one day that he and Willie Heinz had already driven half a dozen cars into the Mohawk and watched them float off toward Albany.
    He had in mind to get himself another bike, a Harley he had all picked out, as soon as he could convince his mother to sign for it. The owners were willing to let it go for a song, too, their own son having been thrown from it and killed, and his memory still fresh in their minds. Once Drew had convinced them that the bike wasn’t right after the wreck and probably never would be, they’d settled on a figure and he’d gone home to find the down payment. The first hundred he found in the top drawer of his mother’s bureau. Then he went looking for my father.
    “Sure,” my father said when Drew Littler slid onto a stool next to him at the Mohawk Grill, interrupting our supper. “I’d love to loan three hundred dollars to somebody dumb enough to throw a shovelful of ice through a second-story window.”
    “Come on, Sammy, I’m asking you.”
    “Not really,” my father said. “Because you’re not stupid enough to think I’d give it to you. And even if I
was
stupid enough, your mother’d never go for it. You just
think
you’re asking me.”
    Drew fished in his jeans pocket. “If she don’t want me to have it, how come she just gave me a hundred dollars for a down payment.”
    My father never even stopped eating. Neither did he look at the money. “Let me get this straight,” he said, carving a fatty piece of rib steak away from the bone. “You want me to believe your mother gave you a hundred dollars toward a motorcycle?”
    “You want to bet she didn’t?” he said. He put a pretty good face on, too. I don’t think I’d have called him. But my father apparently saw the lie even in his peripheral vision, and before the boy could stuff the money back in his pocket he grabbed the bills