The Risk Pool

returned to his own table without having offered an apology. He later claimed not to have known that the ball had actually hit anyone, and this may have been true.
    When Drew had returned to his own table, the Negro kids huddled together at one end of their table, their brows knit suspiciously, but too badly outnumbered to be more than indignant. The boy Drew hit let the others examine the base of his skull. All four were about sixteen, and after a few minutes they went back to shooting pool, though more carefully now, three watching the room in anticipation of another attack, while the fourth shot. Negroes, at least Negroes in groups, had never been welcome in the pool hall, but these boys apparently were determined to finish their rack so they could leave without the appearance of running away.
    By the time they were ready to go, at least two or three of the idle men who had been lounging around the snack bar had gone over to where Drew Littler was slapping balls around the tableand had a word with him. When the Negroes left, Drew Littler said nothing, but watched them go. According to some, he had been drinking, but few picked up on a far more important detail. When the Negroes left the pool hall, they had the misfortune to be parked right out front. They were in a shiny, late-model car that one of the boys had borrowed from his father. And, when they got into the car, they made another mistake; they did not drive away. Rather, they held a caucus of some sort, allowing Drew Littler to pay for his table time and follow them outside. For some reason they did not drive away even when they saw him emerge from the pool hall with a cue stick in his hand. Perhaps it was because he came out alone and because there were four of them, and maybe because they thought they knew him. One of the boys turned out to be Wussy’s nephew, and he later said from his hospital bed that they all thought Drew Littler was coming over to say he was sorry.
    They were wrong. Without stopping for pleasantries, Drew Littler smashed one of the new car’s headlights with the cue stick and kicked a dent in the front door on the passenger side. Then he asked if anybody wanted to call him a cocksucker to his face. All four of the boys got out of the car and crowded around the dent, staring at it in disbelief. The boy who had borrowed the car from his father looked like he might cry. Staring at the damage, he said, “Cocksucker,” before he could think.
    The word was no sooner out than Drew hit the boy in the ribs with the cue, sending him to the sidewalk gasping for breath. By the time the fat cop on duty up the street at the Four Corners arrived on the scene, Drew had beaten all four boys so badly that each had to be taken to the emergency room. He had used one boy as a battering ram until he’d gone limp and then he’d taken the pool cue to the shiny car again. He was bashing the windshield when the cop arrived on the scene and told Drew Littler he’d better quit it right now before he got into serious trouble. Whereupon Drew told the cop to go fuck himself. This had the effect of subtly shifting the cop’s allegiances, and when Drew came around the car to have at the other side and made the mistake of turning his back, the cop coldcocked him with his nightstick and that was that.
    When Drew woke up, he was in jail and he had no idea that he was only part of that afternoon’s excitement in Mohawk. For at approximately the same time that he was administering a savagebeating to the four Negro boys and their shiny car, Jack Ward was having a heart attack on the sixteenth hole of the Mohawk Country Club. Both ambulances had already been dispatched to the pool hall, where the attendants had their work cut out for them. By the time one of the two made it back across town to the country club, Jack Ward had been dead for twenty minutes.
    The best thing about my being something of a fixture at the Mohawk Grill was that my presence in the establishment lacked significance. To the men who gathered there in the late afternoon, I was at once ubiquitous and invisible, and they seldom took special care not to talk in front of me. Only the word “fuck” (and it had to be shouted) had the effect of making me real to them. They were the sort of men who said the word, then looked around to see who was there. “You didn’t hear that, Sam’s Kid,” they joked. (Only a few even remembered my name, and even they had picked up on Wussy’s nomenclature.)