The Risk Pool

said I thought Norm was a better name anyhow.
    When the pan was clean, or clean enough so the flies weren’t interested in it anymore, we returned to the cabin. Wussy was cleaning the last of the fish, tossing its string of insides off into the bushes. My father found some oil in the cabin and before long the four fish were sputtering in the big skillet. Then we ate them right down to their tiny bones and drank from the icy river. Even my father had stopped complaining.
    We fished some more that afternoon. Wussy was good at it. Between pulling them in, baiting up, stringing the catch, and tending to me, he was pretty busy. My father could have used some help too, but Wussy ignored him and my father, who claimed to know how to fish, refused to ask. They were always needling each other anyway, and my father didn’t want to ask the kind of stupid question about his equipment that Wussy could turn to advantage. Every time we looked at my father, he was either tying on a new hook, or rebaiting it, or trying to figure out why there was a big nest of monofilament line jamming his reel. After a while my father took his act up around the bend in the river where he could fight his gear in private. “With most fishermen,” Wussy remarked, “the contest is between the man and the fish. With the rockhead, it’s between him and his reel.”
    I caught two more trout during the afternoon and would havebeen among the world’s truly happy boys if I could have just stopped itching. In addition to my legs, my stomach and shoulders were now covered with angry red blotches. “Looks like you found some poison ivy all right,” Wussy remarked. “You’d be better off not scratching if you could avoid it.”
    I couldn’t though, and after another hour of watching me dig myself, Wussy said he was going to fish his way upriver and tell my father we’d better head back before I drew blood. I reeled in, leaned Wussy’s rod up against the cabin porch and jumped from rock to rock along the river edge to where I found my father seated on the bank. Wussy was standing thigh deep in the river, about twenty yards away, calmly reeling in a trout and smiling, no doubt at the fact that my father was engaged in extracting a barbed hook from his thumb by swearing at it. Swearing was about the only thing he did that didn’t work the hook deeper into his thumb. To make matters worse, there was only an inch or two of line at the end of the rod, which kept falling off his knee, and further setting the hook. By the time he washed the blood away so he could see what he was doing, and balanced the rod on his knee, the bright blood was pumping again and he’d have to stop and wipe the sweat off his forehead. He looked like he was mad enough to toss everything into the woods, and he probably would have if he himself hadn’t been attached to it.
    When Wussy had landed, cleaned, and strung his last trout, he came over and surveyed the situation. “Where you got all your fish hid?” he said. “There’s a little room left on this stringer.” He sat down on a rock out of striking distance, but close enough to observe what promised to be excellent entertainment.
    My father didn’t bother answering him about the fish.
    “Your old man looks like he could use some cheering up,” Wussy said. “Tell him how many fish you caught, Sam’s Kid.”
    I wasn’t sure it would cheer him up, but I told him three, and I was right, it didn’t.
    “Anything I can do?” Wussy said.
    My father gave him a black look. “How you planning to get home?” he said weakly.
    “I figure I’ll just sit right here till you pass out from loss of blood and then take your car keys. Somebody will find you along about Labor Day and that hook will still be right where it is now.”
    “You better hope so, because if I get it out it’s going up your ass.”
    Wussy ignored the threat. “Of course you know best,” he said slowly, “but if that hook was in my thumb, the first thing I’d do is release my bail.”
    My father looked at him, not comprehending. I was close enough, so I leaned over and tripped the bail, releasing the line. My father flushed.
    “Now you got room,” Wussy continued, “I’d bite that line in two.”
    Humbled, my father did as he was told. Wussy picked up the rod and reeled in the slack.
    “And?” my father said.
    “And now I got the majority of my gear back,” Wussy said, turning back toward the cabin. “You can just go ahead and keep that