The Risk Pool

home.”
    The bartender turned out to be my old friend Mike, from The Elms, which he’d lost two years earlier in Vegas. He seemed in pretty good spirits, considering. The first thing he did was slap a quarter in front of me and tell me to play the jukebox.
    “Fucking Duane Eddy,” he winked at my father. “The kid musthave played a hundred dollars worth of Duane Eddy, in quarters.”
    “Who’s Duane Eddy?” my father said. I don’t think he ever heard music, no matter what kind it was or how loud you played it.
    “So,” my father said when Wussy was in the John and Mike had gone off to pour drinks. “What’s up?”
    “What do you mean?” I said, though I knew what he meant, all right. He meant I hadn’t been in Mohawk in seven years and now here I was, and he was curious about the timing. Not so curious that the question couldn’t wait three hours to get asked, but curious.
    “A little bird’s been whispering in your ear, I imagine,” he said.
    “Not really,” I replied lamely.
    “Nobody’s mentioned my little problems, right?” he said, looking at me the way he used to when we played Liars, or when he wanted to know what the hell was wrong with me.
    “I just got here,” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody yet.”
    He nodded. “They don’t have telephones out there in New Mexico, right?”
    “Arizona,” I said.
    “No telephones in Arizona, right?”
    “Right,” I said. “If there were, you’d have called me sometime, right?”
    “Or you’d have called me, since you knew where
I
lived.”
    “Or you’d have called my mother to find out my number,” I said. Then it occurred to me that something he’d said wasn’t true. “Besides, how was I supposed to know you were back in Mohawk.”
    He answered the part he was comfortable about. “I don’t talk to your mother. You know that.”
    “Bullshit,” said Wussy, fresh from the men’s room and trailing the unmistakable scent of urinal cakes. “We saw her last year when we went over there to get the pool table. Take it back to New Mexico with you when you go. I’ve busted my balls on it for the last time.”
    “Arizona.”
    “I don’t care where,” Wussy said. “Just take it. Every time the rockhead gets evicted, I get to have my back fucked up all over again. Wouldn’t be so bad if he’d get a first-floor apartment every now and then.”
    My father nudged me. “Everybody should work once in a while, don’t you think? Just for a change of pace?”
    “I’m just glad there aren’t no ten-story buildings in Mohawk,” Wussy said.
    “They got the high rise going up,” Mike said, having drifted back from the other end of the bar.
    Wussy shook his head. “The good news is you gotta be sixty-five to get in there. Sam Hall won’t live to
be
no sixty-five. There’s less of him every year.”
    “I’ll piss on
your
grave,” my father said. “After that, I don’t care.”
    “You show the kid your finger?” Wussy wanted to know.
    “What finger?” my father said. His left hand was on the bar, fingers surrounding the tapered stem of his beer glass. His right hand was tucked under his left armpit as he hunched forward, elbows on the bar. It occurred to me that he’d been sitting that way pretty much all night.
    “What finger?” I said.
    “ ‘What finger’ is right,” Wussy said.
    “You mean this one?” my father said, putting his right hand on the bar where I could see it. All that was left of his once blackened thumb was a stub, which stopped just short of where the knuckle would have been. I stared at it stupidly, unwilling to accept the testimony of my senses. Was it possible I had played pool with him for two hours and not noticed? It wasn’t his bridge hand, but still.
    “Could have been worse. It wasn’t his pussy finger, anyhow,” Wussy said.
    “Nope,” my father said, showing Wussy his middle finger.
    “Put that away before you lose it too,” Wussy advised. “Pretty soon you’ll be left-handed.”
    I was still looking at the mangled thumb. “Jesus,” I said, feeling suddenly woozy.
    “No big thing,” my father said, flexing the other fingers on the right hand, the thumb stub bowing forward in awkward concert with the others. “Little accident last summer is all. Some dumb Polack forgot to hold on to a four-hundred-pound pipe.”
    “Jesus,” I said again.
    My father shrugged. “You don’t really think you could beat me at eight-ball if I had all my fingers, do you?”
    “I’m