The Risk Pool

and handed the wad to Untemeyer, who was seated two stools down, his customary spot at the end of the lunch counter.
    “Hey!” Drew Littler said, looking at the bookie so ferociously that the blood drained from the old man’s face.
    “Hey, your ass,” my father said, getting the boy’s attention back. “If your mother gave you that hundred dollars, I’ll give you another five hundred. In fact, if you even came by that money honestly, I’ll give you another five. We find out you didn’t, I put the money in my pocket. We can call your mother right now.”
    “She’s at work,” the boy said, so feebly that even I knew he’d been lying now. It was all over his face.
    “I know the number. Meyer here can call. I won’t even say a word.”
    “I got a better idea,” Drew Littler said. “I give you ten seconds to give me back that hundred or I break your face.”
    “Whose?” Untemeyer said, handing over the money. “His or mine?”
    “Nobody’s,” Harry said without turning around. “Go down to the pool room if you gotta fight. Kill each other, for all I care. Just not here.”

26
    With Claude at Mohawk High and me in the junior high, I seldom saw him that winter. All things considered, he wasn’t treated that badly. True, some kids made choking noises when they passed the table that he had all to himself in the cafeteria, but they seldom got much closer or became truly abusive. No one wanted the responsibility of being personally acquainted with someone who’d tried to kill himself. About the cruelest thing was done by the principal of Mohawk High who, without being petitioned, excused Claude from his gym class requirement, an exemption granted only in cases of severe handicap. Not taking gym pretty much completed Claude’s ostracism.
    Not that he minded so very much. He’d taken to drawing elaborate, baroque dinosaurs in his spiral notebooks, and these appeared to satisfy him. No one, including his teachers, bothered todiscuss his dinosaurs or anything else with him and he told me he didn’t mind school at all now that he was never called upon in class.
    Sometimes, if my father wasn’t around and nothing was doing at the diner and I was bored with shooting pool by myself in the Accounting Department, I’d get on my bike and head over to Claude’s and spend an uncomfortable hour with him and his mother. Their property was beginning to show the effects of the weather and Claude Sr.’s desertion. The rusted gas barbecue in the backyard tilted crazily, snow having been plowed up against it. Nobody had bothered to straighten the bowed crossbeam of the ramada after Claude hanged himself from it, and a fissure now ran the length of the empty in-ground pool. The house itself, though I couldn’t put my finger on anything wrong with it, also seemed different. It smelled like no one lived there, the way my mother’s house had smelled the day I’d broken in to furnish it with knickknacks from Klein’s.
    Whenever I turned up, Claude would have something he wanted me to examine, something he thought was pretty cool. Usually, he’d just hand me whatever it was without preface, as if he didn’t want to bias my judgment by alerting me to whatever I was supposed to appreciate. Sometimes it would be a comic strip, or a magazine article, a weird marble from his father’s collection, or one of his better dinosaurs. He liked watching me as I examined whatever it was. Claude had a wonderful eye for typos, the most amusing of which he always cut out and saved for me. Our favorite was from the
Mohawk Republican
, which reported the conviction of an Amsterdam man for “Rape,” it said. “Three cunts.”
    Most of the curiosities Claude showed me did contain something pretty interesting, if you looked long enough, but it was Claude’s facility at spotting them that was fascinating. Once he showed me a full-page color ad for Kentucky bourbon he’d torn from a magazine, handing me a magnifying glass, as if to suggest that, of course, I would want to examine it closely. The ad pictured a country road bordered on both sides by tall dark trees and just inside them a white fence, the kind used to border horse pastures. There was a pheasant in the foreground, and way down the road where the dark line of trees converged, was an oncoming car, an old Model T it looked like, though I couldn’t tell for sure, even with the magnifying glass. But that wasn’t what he’d wantedme to look at anyway. Finally, he moved