The Risk Pool

“The S.O.B. liked this one, too.”
    We listened to the whole thing, the old woman tapping her foot to the increasingly frenzied beat, her hair even wilder now. I kept expecting the bobby pins to come loose and ping across the room at me and Ralph, whom I remained conscious of now, invisible or not. Ralph was her son, I discovered, and his refusal to quit cleaning fish when they had company his mother considered unreasonable.“I don’t see why everyone should be made uncomfortable just so you can show off,” she said to the cushion next to me.
    I was pretty relieved to learn there were only the four of us in the room, because I had feared there might be more. There weren’t, so I began to relax a bit. After all, Ralph was occupied with his fish and no trouble at all except for the smell. She read him the riot act about that and the fact that they were always knee-deep in scales, then went back to her husband, Byron. “I was always a sucker for tall men,” she admitted, and Byron had been tall and always neatly dressed in dark pinstriped suits. His dark beady eyes should have tipped her off, but they didn’t. She hadn’t discovered he wore a toupee until after his death. “Don’t ask me how I found out,” she said.
    When I asked her how come she played all his favorite records if she hated him so much, she explained that never once in their thirty-odd years together had he ever let her buy a record
she
wanted, which meant that if she felt like music, well this was it. She didn’t mind the music so much, she just hated the memories.
    “So,” she said. “Tell me about your girlfriends.”
    I was willing to let Claude go first, or even Ralph for that matter, but the old woman was glaring right at me. I didn’t want to admit the truth—that I hadn’t a girlfriend—for fear that the admission would be seen as evidence that I was destined for a life of faggotry like Byron. “There’s this one girl …” I began, thinking about Tria Ward and getting ready to describe her if need be.
    “Good!” the old woman thundered, looking over at Claude now, as if to suggest that he listen up, that mine was an example worth following. She seemed completely satisfied with my flat statement that there was a girl, as if she were quite capable of filling in the details. And indeed she slipped right into a reverie, a snockered smile spreading across her face, as she rocked gently, back and forth, in a chair that didn’t. In a few short moments she was fast asleep, leaving Claude and me alone with Ralph.
    When the old woman began to snore, Claude went over and covered her with a heavy quilt that lay over one arm of the sofa. In back of the chair he found a bottle and held it up so I could see. It was bourbon, the same brand as the one in the magazine ad. His eyes were alive with significance.
    For a minute the two of us stood there, watching Mrs. Agajanian’s narrow chest rise and fall gently beneath the quilt. Ithink we both feared that her breathing would stop right then with the two of us standing over her ghoulishly.
    We slipped quietly out the back and went over to Claude’s house. According to Claude’s mother, Mrs. Agajanian was all alone in the world and was subject to “spells.” She had no son named Ralph, never a husband, homosexual or otherwise. She was living in the house she’d grown up in, visited by her doctor, who wrote her prescriptions for the spells.
    Mrs. Agajanian’s nap must have been pretty short, because half an hour later, when I was ready to head back to the diner for my five o’clock rendezvous with my father, I heard a light rapping on the window, and there she was, her white face right up against the glass, faded hair ringing it like a thundercloud. It sounded like she had the Victrola on again, and she did the waltz move, the heavy curtains coming together as she spun away.

27
    My father liked to wait until he was sure winter was finished before he went back to work on the road. That meant May, even when spring came in April. This year, though, he went back to work at the end of March. The reason he gave was that he owed me money, and for a while I thought I might get it back, or part of it. But, like the previous winter, we’d gotten behind a couple months rent and we owed Harry, too. Then Drew Littler got himself in a jam and my father loaned Eileen some money. My father’s ideas about debt were vague, cosmic. He figured if you had money and somebody needed some, you gave