The Risk Pool

we use the phone?” my father said. There was one hanging on the wall.
    “Not a bit. Dial 0 for the Philippines.”
    While Eileen called The Elms, my father sampled something brown on a cracker off one of the serving trays and handed an identical one to me. I made the mistake of stuffing the whole thing in my mouth before tasting it. My father was grinning at me. “You want people to go away, I’d trot these right out there, Tilly.”
    “Don’t blame me. It’s catered all the way from Schenectady. Too important a shindig to trust to me.”
    In as much as I still hadn’t swallowed, my father handed me a cocktail napkin. I used it, too.
    “There,” Eileen said, hanging up the phone. “I got the night off.”
    Then, to everyone’s surprise, she shouldered one of the serving trays full of hors d’oeuvres and disappeared out into the noisy foyer. My father and I looked at each other.
    “Where’s the caterer?” my father said to Mrs. Petrie, who remained parked and unshamed.
    “Stretched out drunk in the front seat of his truck,” Mrs. Petrie said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I may join him.”
    “Well,” my father said, taking a deep breath and cuffing me one in the back of the head. “Let’s go see my old buddy Jack.”
    * * *
    It was a while before we saw him, though. The casket stood along one wall of the long living room and the line of people waiting to pass before it snaked around like the welfare line down at the unemployment building on the first of the month. The first person we ran into was Wussy, who I discovered, to my surprise, was half bald. I’d never seen him without his fishing hat before, and he looked like he wished he had it on now, along with his old chinos and flannel shirt, instead of the plaid sport coat and tie. The coat fit him about as well as mine fit me. “Pretty spiffy, Sam’s Kid,” he said to me. Then to my father. “Nice turnout.”
    “Jack had friends, all right,” my father said. “I didn’t know you were one.”
    There was something a little wrong with the way my father said it, but if Wussy noticed, he didn’t let on. “What’s with Eileen?” he said, having spotted her across the room, returning to the kitchen now with the empty tray.
    “Reflex,” my father said. “Or something.” It was clear he didn’t think much of this particular reflex, if that’s what it was. Not that there was anything he could do about it. “You seen Zero today?”
    “Nope,” Wussy said. “Heard they cut him loose. No reason to keep him. Wasn’t no white boys he put in the hospital.”
    “You know how it goes,” my father said.
    “That’s right.”
    “There were four of them, you know.”
    “And they were where they weren’t supposed to be to begin with, right?”
    My father raised his eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say,
You tell me
.
    Tree was there too and he came over and joined us. He’d been standing next to a woman so big that at first I’d thought it was Alice from The Lookout, but when she turned around I saw it wasn’t. “Nice crowd,” Tree said, then to Wussy, “Y-y-you a friend of Jack’s?”
    Wussy didn’t say anything. After a minute he drifted away.
    “Nice going,” my father said.
    “W-what,” Tree said.
    “Nice going, that’s all.”
    “W-what’s he doing here?”
    “What’re
you
doing here?”
    “Don’t get t-t-touchy, Sammy.”
    “R-r-right,” my father said.
    Eileen came by and Tree took an assortment of hors d’oeuvres, balancing them halfway up his arm. My father and I watched the expression on his face as he chewed the first one.
    “Now what’re you going to do with the others?” my father said.
    Tree looked around desperately for a place.
    My father took a couple, popped one in his mouth. “You never had pâté, you rube?”
    “I should’ve known. If it looks like sh … it and smells like sh … it, it must be—”
    “Right,” my father said, munching the other.
    “I’ll just give this last one to M-marge,” Tree said, obviously pleased to have remembered her.
    “She looks hungry,” my father admitted.
    We watched him return to where the huge woman was standing all by herself, elbow to elbow with strangers, nobody to talk to. She looked pleased and relieved by Tree’s return, as if she’d half expected to be ignored the rest of the evening. She accepted the cracker and chewed on it daintily, not at all offended. Tree shrugged at us across the room.
    I could not take my eyes off the big