The Risk Pool

I’d been fourteen then, and I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize him. My first night on the bus—we must have been somewhere in New Mexico—I dreamed that when I arrived in Mohawk, a toothless, feeble old man with a cloud of gray hair was there to meet me at the Four Corners. When I stepped off the bus, he croaked, “Ned? Ned my boy?” and I pushed him away angrily, my own father. The dream had been so spooky it got me trying to calculate how old he was, so I wouldn’t be surprised. I figured he had to be between forty-five and fifty. That was as close as I could get.
    Eileen hadn’t gone into detail. She said she’d called because she was wondering whether I had any plans to visit my mother once school was out (How had she known that I was
in
school and where?), because if I was, I should look my father up, because his life wasn’t so hot right now and because maybe a visit from his college graduate son would buck him up. “You don’t have long hair, do you?” she added.
    “Not very,” I said.
    “Good,” she said. “Long hair’s one of the things that’s got him bent out of whack, or so I’m told.”
    They themselves were on the outs, at least from what I could gather. I was to forget this call, in fact. There wasn’t much she could do with him anymore, not that she ever had been able to do that much. Hadn’t my mother written about him?
    I said no, not a word, which struck her as odd and me as normal. According to Eileen, he’d been arrested no fewer than five times in the last two years, his drunken exploits fully chronicled in the
Mohawk Republican
, a newspaper that she seemed surprised to discover was not routinely for sale at newsstands in Tucson, Arizona. Was I sure I hadn’t heard a thing?
    For some reason, again according to Eileen, in the most advanced stages of his drunkenness he would recall that he had a son who was a college graduate and then he’d start talking about me to anybody who’d listen. People were getting tired of it. I said I could understand that.
    We left it that I’d think about paying a visit in a couple of months, but by the time I hung up I’d decided to leave for Mohawk in the morning. There was nothing keeping me in Tucson, I realized. Certainly not the doctoral degree I’d begun to lose interest in the moment the draft lottery had freed me to pursueit. My landlord would be pissed if I bolted midterm, but he’d keep my deposit and sell my few sticks of furniture to make himself feel better. And he’d long coveted my tree stump. So, I threw my clothes into my grandfather’s old navy duffel bag, and in the morning I drove the Galaxie down to a used car lot across from the Greyhound terminal. I told a man wearing a sport coat that was shinier than any of the cars on his tiny lot that I could let him have the Ford for three hundred dollars. We settled on eighty-five, with which I purchased a See America special fare ticket. There was almost twenty dollars left over, which meant that I’d be able to eat during the three-day trip, at least occasionally.
    In Albany, I had to change buses for the short trip further upstate to Mohawk. I had a few fellow passengers to begin with, but the last of them got off in Amsterdam, leaving the big bus to its driver and me. I stayed where I was, halfway down the aisle, and watched the cold spring rain through the dirty window. The countryside was already lush and everywhere green, except where tilting rusted billboards interrupted the landscape, last season’s advertisements for bankrupt businesses peeling down in strips. The constant sunshine of the Southwest, so full of false optimism, had often depressed me, and it occurred to me, as I sat there in the straining bus as it lumbered up Fonda Hill toward Mohawk, that I had solved the problem of excess optimism, anyway. It was the kind of gray late afternoon that promised dusk within minutes, but wouldn’t make good for three hours. That was fine with me. I was in no hurry.
    When the bus pulled up in front of the cigar store on the Four Corners and I was handed my duffel bag, I realized I didn’t know what to do next. Main Street was virtually deserted after business hours, and sad-looking too, the emptiness of it, compared to the downtown of my childhood. From the Four Corners I could see that several more buildings had come down, including the movie theater and the old City Hall where my father had on numerous occasions spent the night. With so many gray buildings