The Risk Pool

talent to lose so grandly—nearly seventy dollars—in such a piss-ant enterprise. “Anybody nervous about my paper?” I said.
    “Not really,” he said. “Though it’s beginning to dawn on them that they don’t know you.”
    “This will happen.”
    “You okay till Monday?”
    “Fine,” I lied. “Great, in fact. I could use a lift back into town though.”
    We went back inside. Ben Slater, the fiftyish English professor whose house it was, was just coming up out of the basement carrying a tray full of dirty glasses, ashtrays, and other dregs of the long night. “Sorry about the beating,” he said, as if he wasn’t, particularly. “Think of it as part of your education.”
    We shook hands all around, and Slater told Robert Crane any time he wanted to introduce any more new blood into the game, he could go right ahead. There was a grandfather clock in the hallway and it said 8:00, not 9:30.
    “Nice fellow,” I said when Robert had backed out of the gravel drive and onto the pavement.
    “Actually, he’s not so bad,” Robert said. “He’s got his own problems.”
    I stared out the window at the desert, hoping to communicate through pointed silence that whatever problems Ben Slater might have, I wasn’t interested in them. Disliking him was the only purely pleasurable thing about the morning. Counting last night, I’d lost nearly a thousand dollars in six weeks, wiping out my savings account, which had contained the student loan money that was supposed to last me through the end of May, almost two months away. On Monday I’d sold my pool cue, and yesterday morning I’d given blood to get table stakes in Ben Slater’s poker game. My rationale was that by playing poker with Ben Slater and the boys I’d be
saving
money, a line of reasoning I’d borrowed from Robert Crane, who used it whenever he needed a night off from the dogs and away from his wife.
    For some reason I thought of Lanny Aguilar, my roommate, who’d accused me of being lucky. He and I had been sharing a three-bedroom apartment with another guy, all of us finishing degrees at the university, each planning to enter graduate programs the following year. And so we’d gathered round the stereo receiver that December afternoon in 1969 to listen to the new draft lottery and find out whether the government would insist we continue our educations in Southeast Asia. There’d been a bunch of us, I remember, all with vested interests. Lanny’s birthday had been first, his number nineteen.
    “Well,” he said, standing up, “that’s over.”
    Nobody said anything. There wasn’t anything to say.
    “In fact,” he went on, looking at each of us individually, “justabout everything’s over. If nobody minds, I think I’ll go over to the library and write my will or something.”
    My own number had been 348 and when Lanny returned from the library later that evening, he’d lifted me right out of the chair I was sitting in and pinned me against the wall with his big forearm up under my chin. “Three forty-eight?” he said. “Three-fucking-forty-eight?”
    As we wound down out of the foothills, Tucson lay below us on the left, shimmering in the already considerable heat. At First Avenue we passed the horsetrack, recently abandoned and already reclaimed by desert weeds. The quarterhorses had run there for a short season until about two years ago, but it had been a hot, low-budget, dusty experience. I tried to think if I’d ever heard of any place that offered pari-mutuel wagering going under before. I couldn’t. In fact, it seemed a violation of natural law, the sort of thing that if it became common knowledge could seriously undermine the way things were done in America.
    “What was your draft number?” I asked Robert.
    He looked at me suspiciously. “Why?”
    “No reason,” I said. “Curiosity.”
    “I don’t remember,” he said. “I ended up Four-F anyway.”
    I frowned at him. Robert was a big man. Fit-looking. “Flat feet?”
    “Acne.”
    “What?”
    “Really. If you had bad acne, they wouldn’t take you. Said the gas masks wouldn’t fit snug. I ate about a dozen Hershey bars a day for two weeks before the physical. Stayed up late, watched dirty movies, quit beating off, wouldn’t wash my face. You should’ve seen me.”
    “Pretty smart,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I believed him.
    “Yes and no,” he said. “Took me about a year to get rid of the rash. Couldn’t get laid. Couldn’t quit the