The Risk Pool

going home,” Wussy said.
    “So go,” my father said. “You’re always promising, but everyplace I go, you’re there.”
    “Take care of him, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said, pocketing his change from the bar. “He’s a dangerous man.”
    “Are you still here?” my father wanted to know.
    “Not me,” Wussy blew him a kiss. “I’m history.”
    When he was, in fact, gone, my father ordered us yet another beer. Our agreement to have just one was a couple six packs defunct, not even worthwhile as a pretense anymore. “So,” he said. “You figure on staying around for a while, or what?”
    “I guess,” I said. “First thing is to find a job.”
    “That’s easy,” my father said and called to Mike, who rejoined us. “I got your new day bartender,” he said.
    Mike looked me over. “I could use one,” he admitted. “A good, clean-shaven, short-haired bartender is something I could use come Monday.”
    “There you go,” my father said. “You know how to make a Manhattan?”
    “Not really,” I said.
    He shrugged. “You got till Wednesday to learn. Otherwise it’s just drawing beer from a tap and pouring shots. Stuff a hotshot college graduate should be able to figure out.”
    He cuffed me then, pretty hard, too. Which made it official. I was home.
    “You’re telling me I don’t know where the Big Bend is,” my father said in feigned disbelief.
    Wussy paid him no attention. He handled my father’s convertible with the kind of ease that suggested that this was not the first time the driving had been relegated to him.
    I was not only drunk, but lost. I’d been okay until Wussy turned off the lake road, then turned again. Two turns was all it had taken to disorient me completely.
    “All I’m telling you,” Wussy said to my father, “is that if I stopped the car and let you out right here you couldn’t find your way back home in two days with a map.”
    “Your ass,” my father insisted. “You missed your turn, I’m telling you.”
    “Right,” Wussy said. “I missed my turn.” He kept right on the way he was going, though.
    “How come you never go home when you say you’re going to?” my father wanted to know. It was puzzling, I had to admit. We’dgone to two more bars after Mike’s Place, and at the second one, there was Wussy again at the end of the bar, big as life.
    “It’s a good thing for you I don’t,” Wussy said. “Be just like you to take your kid up into the mountains his first night back and the two of you never heard from again.”
    “Can you get something to eat in this place?” I said, suddenly ravenous in the cold night air. My eyes were streaming now. It felt cold enough to snow, April or no April.
    Wussy looked over at my father. “If you aren’t too particular, I guess.”
    My father was still convinced we were going the wrong way. “Lake George has all kinds of food,” he said. “That’s where we’re going to end up if we stay on
this
road. We’ll be there just about in time for a late breakfast.”
    “What’s this up here?” Wussy said, slowing down, pointing to a building set back off the road in a clearing. At the dirt road turnoff, our headlights swept across a carved wooden sign nailed to a tree. “ BIG BEND HUNTING LODGE ” it said.
    “Son of a bitch,” my father said, running his fingers through his hair, which was standing straight up from the wind.
    “I never heard you,” Wussy said. “What’s this place? Lake George?”
    My father shrugged. “What can I tell you? It’s not the way I go to get to the Big Bend, that’s all.”
    “The fact that we got here proves that,” Wussy said, pulling into the large lot. There were only three or four other cars besides ours, and the place was dark except for a “Carling Black Label” in one window. “Welcome to the Happy Hunting Grounds, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy chuckled.
    We all got out and felt our way in the dark toward the big porch, the lodge itself nothing but a vague outline against the dark trees, which moaned high up in the wind. On the steps it occurred to my father to ask me something. “You aren’t married are you,” he said.
    I told him I wasn’t.
    From inside we heard faint music, distant, as if it were coming from deep in the surrounding woods. It was louder when Wussy opened the door and yellow light spilled out onto the porch. A woman, naked from the waist up, was sitting cross-legged on a bar stool across the room, talking to the woman bartender, who was also