The Risk Pool

drained or settled somewhere out of sight.
    My father, who was spreading a sheet on the pool table when I returned from the john, read my mind. “She’s not the prettiest girl you ever saw,” he said, “but she’s one of the best.”
    I said I thought so too, and he showed me his pinky, though there wasn’t much to see, taped as it was to the two fingers next to it. “Does it hurt?” I said.
    “Not much,” he said, flexing the fingers that would. “Did when he set it, but what are you gonna do?”
    I climbed up on the makeshift bed. “Where are you going to sleep?”
    “In there,” he said. “Just in case. Aren’t you going to put pajamas on?”
    I said I wasn’t. I didn’t plan to take my shoes off either. Just in case.
    “Don’t worry about him,” my father said, running the fingers of his good hand through his hair. “Some day, huh?”
    I said it was some day, all right.
    “You okay?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    “Need anything?”
    I could have used a pillow, but that was the only thing. I didn’t want Drew’s (my) pink one.
    “Things get bad sometimes,” my father said, as if he thought that needed saying. “It’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
    I said sure, I understood.
    “If it meant something, it’d be different,” he said. “But it’s just how things are.”
    I finally fell asleep to the tune of Wussy’s whistling snore, the sky outside our Main Street apartment turning gray. Maybe the bad things didn’t mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to. For a while I was back at the Ward house, part of a long circular procession of perfect strangers filing endlessly past Jack Ward’s casket. I must have done that funeral loop a dozen times before I fell into a deeper, dreamless sleep.
    I never heard the footsteps on the stair outside, and the banging on the fogged glass door of the Accounting Department seemed at first a part of some new dream just getting under way. It must have gone on for some time before I struggled half-awake. F. William Peterson had just tried the door and found it to be unlocked. His face was white and he looked like he expected to find an apartment full of dead people, which, given the condition of the entryway below—broken glass everywhere, dried blood on the wall and a trail of it leading all the way up to our door—was a reasonable, if incorrect hypothesis. Behind him in the dark hallway was a small woman, and just as I became aware of her, I heard Wussy say, “Oh, shit!” and duck behind the sofa back he’d been peering over. My father was in the bedroom doorway in his undershorts. “Who is it?” came Eileen’s sleepy voice from the bedroom.
    I wanted to know, too. I sat up on the pool table for a better view, and until she stepped forward from the gray hallway into the full morning light, I did not recognize my own mother.

28
    And so began the final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn’t be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawkin their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it’s away. Return we do, but only to gain momentum for our next outward arc, each further than the last, until there is no elasticity left, nothing to draw us home.
    F. William Peterson had managed it all. He had found my mother a nice flat on the second floor of a stone house on Greenwood Drive. The owner was an elderly woman whose husband had recently died, and she charged my mother less than the going rate for rentals in that area. I was part of the deal. I would mow the lawn with her rickety old mower in summer, rake leaves and incinerate them in the big rusted drum in autumn, shovel the sidewalk and the long drive that led from the street to the empty two-car garage in winter. (Neither we nor our landlady would own a car until 1965, the second half of my senior year in high school, when I bought a 1959 battleship-gray Galaxie to take me west to the university.)
    There was no way F. William Peterson could have saved the old house, and most of its profits had been eaten up, but we were far from destitute. The furniture was still ours and a few thousand dollars besides. And my mother, who had to continue her medication and was thus certified disabled, received a small