The Risk Pool

And while you were at it, you’d have to take his friends’ cars, too. And even then, you’d only be making it more inconvenient for him. He had a lot of friends.
    “All of this is off the record, by the way. A young colleague of mine is the attorney of record. Your mother ever found out I was involved …”
    I drew my index finger across my throat. He shuddered.
    We just sat and looked at each other for a minute, and suddenly we were grinning like a couple of conspirators who shared important inside knowledge, or perhaps even affection.
    Finally, we stood and shook again. “Damn, it
is
fine to see you, Ned.”
    I said it was good to see him, too. “You better get on over there,” I told him.
    Outside in the street, we shook hands a third incredible time, and suddenly he said, “How you fixed for money?”
    I was very glad he asked. “Actually …”
    “Right,” he said, and handed me a twenty.
    “I don’t know when I’ll be able to give it back,” I warned him.
    “What difference,” he said. “You’re here. That’s the main thing.”
    I shoved my hands in my pockets, because he looked for all the world like he wanted to shake on that too.
    “You better call by ten-thirty. That’s when she goes to bed,” he said, flushing red in the gathering darkness.
    I said I’d remember. “Any idea where I can find him?”
    “Try right around the corner on Glenn. The Night Owl. If not there, Greenie’s. If not there …”
    “Right,” I said.
    “By ten-thirty,” he said. “You’ll … shave, of course.”
    I shouldered my duffel bag and we parted. At the Four Corners I stopped and looked back up the street and saw that he’d stopped too and was waving. I waved back.
    The Night Owl had been called something else the last time I was in Mohawk. I tried to remember what, and couldn’t. But I was pretty sure it was one of the few bars my father hadn’t frequented. Standing outside, I suddenly felt weak, partly from not having eaten in a while, but mostly from being spooked. The possibility that I might not recognize my own father swept over me again, and along with it a wave of nausea. I propped my duffel bag up against the wall of the tavern and sat on it for a minute or two until the low dusky sky turned honest black. From inside came the clack of billiard balls and the occasional volley of deep-throated male laughter. He probably wasn’t even in there, I told myself. In fact, I probably had a long night ahead of me. I not only wouldn’t find him here, but I’d have to hit Greenie’s and the High Life and The Glove, and the Outside Inn, and he wouldn’t be at any of them. He would be someplace like The Elms on the outskirts of town, too far to walk with a duffel bag in the dark. Or maybe he was even farther off than that, in some new favorite place in Johnstown or Mayfield or Perth, or someplace on theSaratoga road where bars grew out of the surrounding woods like native flora. Maybe he would be out at The Lookout, the first of the bars he took me to with Tree, that afternoon in October when I’d gone to the beach with the Claudes. He could be anywhere, and it was doubtful that F. William Peterson, of all people, would know his precise whereabouts.
    I was just getting to my feet when a blue pickup with a tiny camper balanced on the back pulled up at the curb and Wussy got out. He looked exactly the same, a little heavier maybe, and wearing what could well have been the same shapeless fishing hat, still full of bright hooks. “Sam’s Kid,” he said right off, as if he’d left me in this precise spot an hour ago with instructions to stay put till he got back.
    We shook hands. “The rockhead inside?” he said.
    I told him I’d been just about to go inside and find out.
    He held the door for me. “That’s his car, so.…” He was pointing to an ancient battleship of a gray Cadillac convertible across the street, one wheel up on the curb. For some reason it had a white hood. I don’t know how I could have failed to notice and draw the necessary inference, but I had. No doubt about it, I’d lost the rhythm of Mohawk life, forgotten what to look for, how to see.
    “Not that that means anything,” Wussy was saying. “He could have left it there two days ago, forgot all about it and reported it stolen by now.”
    Just inside, I hesitated, grabbing the sleeve of Wussy’s blue flannel shirt. “I hear he’s in rough shape,” I said.
    “Sam Hall was born in rough shape,” Wussy