The Risk Pool

chocolate. Got to be a vicious circle, kind of.”
    I looked over at him. He was absolutely deadpan. I examined his face for signs of acne. “Bullshit,” I said finally.
    “Good for you,” he grinned. “Most people believe that story. The acne was my fall-back plan actually. I’ve always wondered if it would have worked.”
    I didn’t say anything, unsure whether acne could be induced.
    “So what
was
your number?” I said when I remembered he’d dodged the issue.
    Robert flushed deeply. “Three sixty-six,” he admitted.
    “Come on.”
    “Really,” he said. “They had to account for February twenty-ninth, remember? Leap years between ’44 and ’50.”
    I laughed out loud.
    “I know,” he said. “I’m a lucky prick. Watch where I walk. Step in my footprints.”
    “That’s what I’ve
been
doing, if you think about it,” I reminded him. It was true, too. I’d met Robert and his wife Anita at a party six months earlier. Everybody had been pretty stoned and Robert, who was also pretty stoned, had confessed to me that he preferred less trendy vices. “You ever go to the dog track?” he wanted to know.
    We went the next night and I could tell right away he was compulsive. The funny part was that Anita was just as bad. They were finishing up M.A.s—Robert in psychology, Anita in English—and living in a dingy married student housing facility. By pooling their meager teaching assistant stipends and eating boxed macaroni and cheese dinners they were able to finance their evenings at the dog track. Anita was as savvy about the dogs as anybody I knew, and if Robert had left things to her, they probably would have been rich. But, of course, there were times when the dogs wouldn’t run for either of them, and then she would resort to writing freshman compositions for football players. She had a knack for writing a genuine C + paper on just about any topic. She knew just the words to misspell, how to mess up the sentences without messing them up
too
much, how to miss the point of the assignment narrowly and do the whole thing in language that never aroused the suspicion of the instructor. Robert said he’d tried it a couple of times, but he’d fucked up and written a solid B + essay for a borderline illiterate and the kid had gotten caught. According to Robert, he’d been the biggest, dumbest, nicest kid you ever met, and he hadn’t given Robert up, even when threatened with suspension. Now Robert stuck to the dogs and poker, and left the freshman essays on
Heart of Darkness
to Anita. When they were hitting at the track, their bank account swelled up to around five grand and they ate out a lot. When the right dogs ran out of the money they ate at home and bickered about whose fault it was until their luck changed. What they bothfeared most was the day they’d be so broke they couldn’t afford admission to the clubhouse.
    “So,” Robert Crane said, when we pulled up in front of my apartment and I’d finished telling him how Lanny had tossed me into the wall for having a 348 draft number. How he’d lasted two months in Vietnam. Robert was looking at me intently, a little cross-eyed, like when he concentrated on the racing form. “You figure if you keep losing long enough you’ll prove you’re just as unlucky as him, is that it?”
    I laughed at him. “Not even close.”
    “Okay,” he said. “My other theory is you’re just the dumbest gambler ever.”
    “You’re getting warmer,” I said, sliding out of his car.
    “Sure you don’t need a couple bucks till Monday?”
    “If I did, I’d say so.”
    “You don’t have to get pissed.”
    “I’m not,” I told him. “You’ve never heard of a losing streak, right?”
    “Your telephone’s ringing,” he said.
    It was. We could both hear it, all the way out there by the curb.
    “The pups run tonight,” he said.
    “The pups run every night,” I reminded him. “I think I’ll take a break, if it’s all right with you. Losing is bad enough without having to listen to people tell you why it’s happening.”
    He put the car in gear. “You’re missing an opportunity. Monday you’ll have to lose twice as much to make up.”
    He was grinning at me, still cross-eyed.
    “And you are a butthole,” I grinned back.
    “A lucky butthole,” he corrected. “And proud of it.”
    By the time I got inside the telephone had stopped ringing, for which I was thankful. It was Sunday, my mother’s day to call, though she usually waited