The Risk Pool

not live happily ever after. His death made me realize that despite living through the war, marrying a rich woman, fathering a beautiful daughter, living in the white jewelhouse, driving the big Lincoln, and dying in the saddle, Jack Ward had not been happy. I was suddenly positive of it, despite the equal certainty of my father’s cronies that his final moments had been, like the rest of his existence, bliss. I remembered the afternoon he took me into the library of the Ward house, the way he looked around as if he’d forgotten what all was in there, if he’d ever known. How little pleasure he had derived from taking inventory. It hadn’t occurred to me then, but when I thought back on it, the way he’d come into the house from the outside, hesitating in the foyer, the crossroads of his own house, his daughter having disappeared down one long corridor, his wife out of sight somewhere, a strange boy peering out at him from the kitchen, he’d looked like a man returning to a place he’d visited long ago, having in the meantime forgotten the floor plan, the location of the room he’d once slept in, occupied now, surely, by somebody else. Not one of the books in that library had been his, nor had he ever turned down a page of one of them to mark his place.
    And now he was dead, his legacy the lewd account circulating about his last living act and how it had taken three men to unbend him sufficiently to get his shorts and grass-stained trousers back over his narrow hips before his wife arrived at the country club. Now
that
, all of it, was a mystery worth pondering, and I thought about it for an hour or so in the sweet darkness of Our Lady of Sorrows without coming to any conclusions, but feeling a little better anyhow. By the time I decided I’d better go home, what little color there had been was now drained out of the stained-glass windows, and if it hadn’t been for the red EXIT sign above the vestibule door, I doubt I would have been able to find my way.
    Outside, it was only slightly less dark, but from the church steps I was able to make out a figure coming down the middle of the street full tilt. It was Willie Heinz, and when he saw me he grinned and waved before I had a chance to step back into the shadows beneath the arched doorway. I thought about trying to catch him so I could ask if it was true about him and Drew Littler stealing cars and parking them in the river. But Willie was too fleet to catch once he had a running start, and he’d no sooner blown by me and made a sharp turn down an alley than a police car, tires squealing, flew down the street in pursuit, missing the turn Willie had made. They didn’t know he always doubled back. I waited a few minutes before emerging from the shadows and heading home on my bike.
    I had come to a conclusion after all. Life was a crapshoot, and it didn’t pay to be mistaken for Willie Heinz.
    Late the next afternoon the busiest stretch of road in the county was the small winding one that led from the highway up through the trees to the Ward house. We crawled up the incline even slower than Tria had done on the afternoon Drew totaled his motorcycle. My father swore every time the brake lights on the car in front of us flashed red. To make matters worse, Eileen was with us and it looked now like she would be late for work at The Elms.
    “What the hell difference does it make,” my father said. “Everybody in Mohawk County is right here. If Irma’s got more than three tables I’ll eat your—” he’d crept up on the bumper of the car in front of him, then had to brake hard and blare the horn.
    “Eat my what,” Eileen said, offering her first half-smile of the day. She’d been in an uncharacteristically black mood all day, and we’d talked her into coming at the last minute to take her mind off things. Drew had been released from jail earlier that afternoon. Eileen had been waiting for him to turn up so she could read him the riot act, lay down a whole new set of ground rules for as long as he lived under her roof. But he’d apparently seen that coming, and now she feared he’d be in trouble all over again before she could even lay down the law. Since that was a distinct possibility, she’d dispatched my father to look for him in the dives he was known to frequent, the only consequence of which was that by five o’clock my father was half loaded and no longer anxious to find Drew Littler, if indeed he ever had been.
    I had surprised my father by