The Risk Pool

driveway.
    “Hello, stranger,” my father said, and a wave of guilt washed over me so powerfully that my knees went liquid. “You forget where downtown is?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Then you must be invisible,” Wussy said.
    “We got it set up pretty good,” my father said. “It should go inside, really, but your mother wouldn’t hear of that.”
    I looked up at the row of windows along the second floor. A curtain twitched in one.
    When Wussy went back to the pickup, my father and I didn’t say anything for a minute. In the two years I’d lived with him we’d gotten to the point where, on a good day, we might actually converse, at least a sentence or two. But in the few weeks since I’d returned to live with my mother, we’d already lost the knack.
    “You gonna be all right here?” he said finally.
    I said sure. I’d be all right. I could feel my throat tightening. He and Wussy hadn’t fought the pool table down three flights of stairs just because he wanted me to have it.
    “She looks good,” he said. “She actually let me in. Showed me around and everything. I about dropped my teeth. She wouldn’t let Wussy in, of course, but …” he let the thought trail off. “She’s got it done up nice, though.”
    “Where are you going?” I said finally.
    “Away. For a while. I’ll be back, I imagine.”
    “When?”
    He took out a couple of dollar bills and handed me one.
    I said three threes.
    “Liar,” he said. He was right, too. There wasn’t a three on it, and I’m not sure I could have seen one if there had been.
    We walked down the drive to where the pickup stood. My father slammed the tailgate up. “That table’s worth seven, eight hundred dollars,” he said. “If she can’t stand to have it around, sell it. I don’t care. As long as you don’t get stiffed.”
    I said I wouldn’t sell it.
    “I didn’t fight very hard to hold on to you, did I?” he said, in reference to the fact that all he’d said to my mother that morning when she’d stepped into his apartment and announced her intention was, “All right, take him.”
    “It’s not what you probably thought,” he went on. “You’re better off here, that’s all. Away from the mess.”
    There was nothing left to do but cuff me in the back of the head, so he did. “We had
some
fun, at least, didn’t we?”
    I said we did, and it was true.
    After we shook, he got in next to Wussy and rolled the window down and grinned at me. “You don’t know it yet, but you loaned me a couple a hundred. I’ll mail it to you in a week or so.”
    “That’s all right,” I told him, “I don’t want it.”
    “You must,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have made me look all over for it.”
    And then he was gone.
    I didn’t see him again for ten years, nor did I ever hear a word concerning his whereabouts. Not a letter, not a Christmas card.
    I must have known I wouldn’t, too, because when they drove off, I went into the garage and shot rack after rack of pool beneath the bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling, just me and a cloud of silent, circling moths.



29
    Robert Crane followed me out onto the bright patio, shading his eyes from the glare of the desert sun. From the foothills, the Catalina Mountains looked blue and close. Their very existence was surprising. Somewhere during the night I’d lost track of time and space. I couldn’t have passed the simplest reality quiz.
    Things can get that way when you’re playing losing poker in somebody’s basement—no windows, no clocks, nobody interested in windows or clocks. Finally somebody taps out, says piss on it, I’m going home. Home. A difficult concept, too long obscured by thick cigarette smoke and warm scotch.
    “What time is it, do you figure?” said Robert Crane, plopping down next to me on the other chaise lounge at the edge of the kidney-shaped pool. Neither of us owned watches, at least at the moment.
    “Spring,” I said.
    The sun was high above the Catalinas. Nine-thirty, I might have bet, if I hadn’t been betting and losing all night, all week, all month. Dog track, pro basketball, poker games.
    “Well,” Robert said. “You won their sympathy, anyway.”
    “That’s important to have,” I said.
    As a rule there was pocket money to be made playing poker with university professors’ who gambled nickles, dimes, and quarters once a month to maintain the relatively inexpensive illusion that they were normal people, real guys. It had taken real