The Risk Pool

Skinny.
    “I don’t want either end,” Wussy said, but he positioned himself at the sleeping boy’s feet. “This one’s not quite so ugly, though … anybody check to see if he’s alive?”
    “He’s alive,” my father said, trying to get some kind of grip under Drew’s armpits.
    “Be just like you to have me lug a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound retard up three flights of stairs and then find out he’s dead.”
    Every time my father tried to lift, Drew’s arms went limp over his head. “You picked the right end, asshole,” my father said to Wussy, who had his hands locked under the boy’s knees. “I suppose you want me to back up the stairs, too.”
    “Only if you want him up there,” Wussy said. “I’m all for leaving him right where he is.”
    It took them fifteen minutes. Finally my father had to take one arm, Skinny the other, going shoulder to shoulder up the narrow stairs, cursing each other’s clumsiness every step. “Don’t fight, girls,” Wussy said, his hands still locked under Drew Littler’s tree-trunk legs. Somebody farted silently, gruesomely, and the three of them argued over who it was, finally settling on me, though I was both downstairs and downwind. Wussy complained about the fact that the boy smelled like bait, and Skinny said hemust have pissed not only in his pants but his shirt as well, because that was clammy and wet, too.
    “Where?” Wussy said when they got him into the apartment.
    “Bathtub,” my father gasped.
    It took some maneuvering, but they finally got him in. Skinny sat down on the commode, deathly white and breathing hard. All three men were sweating.
    “You could stand a shower your own self,” Wussy said, glaring at Skinny Donovan.
    “It’s not me that stinks,” Skinny said defensively. “It’s him.”
    Drew’s blond head was still slumped forward on his chest, and the spot where the glass fragment had stuck in his skull was now black and matted, though the bleeding had pretty much quit. Wussy put a finger on the boy’s throat. “Well, you’re right for once,” he said. “He’s alive. Anybody call his mother?”
    “Run over to the diner,” my father said to me. “Take your time. Try not to scare her to death. Maybe we can get him cleaned up by the time she gets here.”
    They didn’t though. I took my time, like he said, and I didn’t tell Eileen anything except that he was with us. She must have heard something in my voice though because she pulled up behind my father’s car about a minute later and got out of her little car just in time to hear a billiard ball come crashing through the window above and land on the hood of Wussy’s truck across the street. During the minute or so I had waited for her, the deserted street had filled with Drew Littler’s howls, and they were more animallike than human.
    By the time Eileen and I got upstairs, my father and Wussy had succeeded in pinning Drew to the floor while Skinny Donovan, in a strictly unauthorized maneuver, kicked the boy in the head until he stopped trying to get up. Wussy had a big knot on his forehead, and my father’s little finger was bent back at an absurd angle. There were billiard balls everywhere.
    Thanks to Skinny’s pointed-toed attacks, the wound in Drew Littler’s head had opened up again and the boy’s face was ghastly with blood. He lay there on the floor beneath the two men, panting and crying and howling like a dog. Then, finally, he passed out again. This time they didn’t put him in the tub. Turning on the shower was what had revived him. Instead, Skinny Donovan wasinstructed to go across the street and call a doctor my father knew. I offered to go, but they wanted Skinny out. Eileen had immediately fallen to kicking him in the shins for kicking her son, and she was now glaring at him as if she might start up again without provocation. When the doctor came, he found a blue vein in Drew’s arm on the first try. The boy never even twitched.
    The doctor recommended getting him out of his wet clothes and letting him sleep where he was—on my bed—until morning, warning that in Drew’s condition, his morning was likely to be midafternoon. Then we were to bring him to the hospital. The gash on his head, though not life-threatening, would probably require stitches and a tetanus shot.
    “You better go over to the emergency room your own self,” the doctor told my father, who, now that he had the leisure to do so, was studying his little finger and cursing