The Risk Pool

hook.”
    I think he would have chased Wussy, hook and all, except that he’d noticed me for the first time and it scared him so he forgot all about his thumb. I had been scratching nonstop and the patches of poison ivy skin were everywhere, including my face. “Look at you,” he said. “Your mother’s going to shoot us for sure.”
    “Shoot
you
,” Wussy said over his shoulder. “Come with me, Sam’s Kid. Stay a safe distance from that rockhead. He’s a dangerous man.”
    My father got back at him by refusing to carry anything out of the woods. I helped a little, but by the time we got back to the convertible Wussy was beat and trying hard not to show it. “What’s that streaming from your thumb?” he asked when we were back on the highway heading for Mohawk. The monofilament line took the breeze and fluttered like a cobweb from my father’s black thumb.
    About that time I noticed the car smelling funny again, and my father pulled over onto the shoulder. He took two cans of oil from the trunk and headed around to the front via the passenger side. I stopped scratching myself when he held out his hand. “Let me see that thing a minute.”
    I felt an awful chill. I could see the gadget in my mind’s eye and it was sitting on the last rock I fished from. I pretended to look for it. “I …” I began.
    But he already knew. “What’d I tell you when I gave it to you?”
    I tried to speak, but could only stare at my patchy knees.
    “Well?”
    “Don’t lose it,” I finally croaked.
    “Don’t lose it,” he repeated.
    I was suddenly very close to tears, even though all the way home I’d been feeling as happy as I thought it possible to feel. I had caught fish and peed in the woods and not complained about my poison ivy. I had felt proud and important and good. Now, having betrayed my father’s simple trust, it came home to me that I was a disappointment to him, just a worthless little boy to be taken home to his mother where he belonged. It might have helped a little if Wussy had said something in my defense, but he was silent in the backseat.
    My father walked around to the driver’s side and kicked the convertible hard. “Let me see that knife,” he said to Wussy.
    “You aren’t using my good knife to punch no holes in no oil cans,” Wussy said.
    There was nothing to do but kick the car again, so my father did it. Then he did it five more times all down the driver’s side of the car. That was all right with Wussy, in as much as it wasn’t his car, but I began to cry, even though it wasn’t my car either. When he was through kicking the convertible, he said, “Come on, dumbbell. Help me find a sharp rock.”
    Then he felt the monofilament line flapping in the breeze, wrapped it between the thumb and forefinger of his good hand, and yanked. The hook came out all right, and along with it a hunk of flesh. Fresh blood began to pour out of the wound and onto the ground. My father swore and flung the line and hook with all his might. It landed about five feet away.
    We started looking along the shoulder for a jagged rock, my father kicking the round ones for not being pointed. When he was a ways up the road, Wussy came over to where I was crying. “Don’t pay no attention,” he advised.
    Then he went back to the car and plunged his knife into the two oil cans. By the time my father got back with a jagged rock, Wussy was tossing the empty cans into the neighboring field and wiping the knife blade on his pants. My father dropped his rock and we all got back in the car.
    “Hey!” he said, looking over at me before putting the convertible back on the road. “Smile. I’m the one with something to cry about.”
    After his walk he wasn’t mad any more and he let me see his thumb. It really was an ugly-looking thumb.
    When we pulled up in front of the house, my mother was sitting on one of the front porch chairs with a blanket over her lap, looking like she’d been there for days. Her face was absolutely expressionless. “Uh-oh,” Wussy said, and suddenly I felt awash in guilt for having enjoyed myself. Looking at her now, I realized how long the last twenty-four hours had been for her. “Don’t forget to take your fish,” Wussy said when I got out, probably hoping that a couple nice trout might appease my mother.
    Let me try to view through her eyes what she saw when we pulled up at the curb that afternoon. First, she saw my father at the wheel, looking a tad nervous but far from