The Risk Pool

it for refusing to go back into place.
    “Don’t worry about me,” he said.
    “I’m not,” the doctor said. “The only one I’m really worried about is him.”
    I didn’t recognize this as a reference to me until I saw everybody staring at me. I guess I must have looked pretty pale. The sight of all the blood had me weak in the knees, and for about the last ten minutes everything in the apartment had taken on a vague, otherworldly quality. I didn’t think I would faint, but I was in the minority. Eileen, who didn’t look so hot herself, got a washcloth and put it to my forehead. The last thing I remember was that the washcloth came away red.
    When I awoke, Wussy and I were alone in the apartment, if you didn’t count Drew Littler (and there was no reason to). Eileen had gone with my father over to the emergency room. Skinny, who claimed a twisted ankle, had begged a lift home, but Eileen wouldn’t give him one, so he’d limped a couple blocks over to Greenie’s Tavern for rye whiskey and sympathy and the opportunity to tell the tale.
    All of this according to Wussy, who was in the bathroom examining the purple knot above his left eye. “You all right, Sam’s Kid?” he said when he spied me in the mirror.
    I said I was.
    “Me too,” he said, though the knot in the mirror continued to hold his attention. Nobody had troubled much about him when it came time to assess damages. They’d fussed about my father’sfinger and Drew’s head and Skinny’s ankle, and even about me for getting bled on. Wussy, everybody just assumed, was okay, and that didn’t seem right to me, even though it turned out to be true.
    Drew Littler had taken the worst of it, that was for sure. He was sleeping fitfully now, one whole side of his face swollen hideously from ear to chin, his eye nothing but a narrow slit. The pillow beneath his head was pink.
    I knew what the doctor had said, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that he might rise up out of bed and go on the rampage again. I watched him nervously until Wussy came out of the bathroom.
    “What should we do it he wakes up?” I said.
    Wussy started picking up billiard balls, which lay scattered underfoot around the apartment. “Run like hell,” he said, but when he saw that wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for, he relented. “He won’t be in the mood for no more fighting for a while. If you were about a quart and a half low and had a broken jaw and only one eye to see out of, you wouldn’t feel like it either. The only thing that kept him going as long as he did was stupidity.”
    That was only partly reassuring. I was sure Drew Littler wasn’t out of stupidity.
    I helped Wussy tape a piece of cardboard over the hole in the window, and together we picked the place up, at least some of it. “We’ve lost the twelve ball someplace,” he said when there was a space left in the rack. I didn’t have the heart to tell him where it was. He was about the unluckiest man that ever was when it came to crossfires, and now his truck’s assortment of dings and dents was richer by one.
    It was late now and there was just one snowy station on the television. Wussy stretched out on the sofa and watched it for almost five minutes before he started snoring loudly.
    It was nearly two hours until my father and Eileen returned, and that gave me time to think. I was groggy, but too nervous to sleep. Drew Littler, it occurred to me suddenly, was dangerously insane. Maybe he had been all along. The meaning of those trips on the motorcycle up the hill to the white jewel house, where we’d stopped outside the stone pillars and just watched, until Jack Ward came out on the patio and stared us away—all of it made sense now. I hadn’t been able to comprehend Drew Littler’s insistence that the Ward house would be his one day.
    He’d expected to inherit it.
    * * *
    It was nearly daybreak before everybody got to sleep. Wussy woke up when my father and Eileen returned from the hospital, then fell asleep again almost immediately. My father tried to get Eileen to go home and come back midmorning, but she wouldn’t. She finally fell asleep curled up next to her son on the bed. I glanced at her there when I went to the bathroom, and felt bad for thinking then that she really was a homely woman. There were times when she was almost pretty, like when she waitressed at The Elms, all fluid, efficient motion. But when the motion stopped, it was like what had made her almost pretty