The Risk Pool

it to him, at least if the guy was all right and would do the same for you. Later on, if you needed it and he had it you could call on him. In the meantime, if you didn’t need it, you left him alone.
    My situation was this. I’d loaned him money, sort of. Because he needed it and was good for it, sort of. But I didn’t need it back,which meant I had no business worrying about it. Later on, if I needed it and if he had it, he was supposed to give the money back. If he didn’t have it, he’d regret the fact and wish there was something he could do. But right now, Eileen needed the money and I didn’t, so he gave it to her. The reason she needed it was that Drew had landed himself in jail after beating some Negroes half to death outside the pool hall. I hadn’t been there, but the event was recounted at the Mohawk Grill in several versions, each apocryphal after its own fashion. After listening to all of them, I did a composite sketch based on my knowledge of Drew Littler and those details common to the several versions of the event, tossing out variants that seemed out of character or attributable to the character and prejudice of the speaker. Having seen Drew Littler shoot pool, I absolutely believed certain aspects of the story that other people doubted. Drew believed that pool operated on much the same principles as weightlifting. He never could be made to understand that a cue ball could not be blasted through a dense cluster of balls and come out the other side with its original trajectory intact, like a fullback plowing through the line of scrimmage. It never paid to daydream when he was shooting either, because balls had a way of becoming airborne in multicolored blurs, rattling off walls and cracking along the floor at shin level. He attacked even the side pockets viciously.
    One afternoon, Drew and I had shot a few racks up in my father’s apartment. I didn’t like playing with him because he couldn’t win but hated to lose. I’d sandbag like a son of a bitch, but there was just no way to keep him in the game. The only time he ever made a shot was by mistake, after the cue ball had rebounded off seven or eight rails. He was that lousy. We’d been playing for about an hour, Drew’s face darkening with each successive loss. Wussy came in and drank a beer, watched us for about thirty seconds, said we both stunk, and lay down on the sofa. I purposely left the cue ball about three inches from the seven, which in turn was no more than three inches from the side pocket. Drew always approached easy shots hungrily, and when he lined this one up, I looked around the room for a safe place. What happened was something I’d never seen before and have never seen since. Drew Littler drove into the cue ball with such force that the felt tip of the cue stuck at the base of the side pocket, snapping the stick in three like a twig. The thick butt remained in Drew Littler’s hand, the slender tip vibrated in theside pocket like an arrow, and the long middle section, razor sharp on both ends, impaled itself in the back of the sofa where Wussy had fallen asleep.
    So I wasn’t the least bit surprised to learn that the whole incident in the pool hall had its origins in Drew Littler’s inability to keep his game separate from the others. According to one eyewitness, Drew Littler had launched the cue ball with such velocity that it cleared the three adjacent tables and hit the skinny Negro kid at the base of the skull so neatly that everybody who hadn’t seen it happen concluded that the ball must have been thrown.
    “Cocksucker!” the kid said, rubbing the base of his neck.
    The significance of this expression was much discussed in the diner. Everybody agreed that the word was used, some claiming that it represented a personal observation, others suggesting that it betokened only the speaker’s general dissatisfaction with the turn of events. In either case, the fateful word was uttered, and several people heard it. The funny part was that Drew himself was not among those who heard. In fact, according to several eyewitnesses, when he approached the Negroes’ table, he was after nothing but the errant cue ball without which his own game could not continue. The Negro kid with the knot swelling on the back of his head had picked it up, and was inspecting the nearest tables, figuring one of them was minus a white ball. When Drew came up and demanded it, the kid handed it over, along with a dark look, and Drew