The Risk Pool

was half sobered up and he insisted on driving home, license or no license. He didn’t care. Fuck ’em.
    “You tell ’em, Rockhead,” Wussy said. He was slumped down in the front seat, trying to sleep, but every time my father caught his eyes closing he’d swerve the car.
    “I’m on my way to work,” my father said. The way things stood, he wasn’t allowed to drive, except to and from his place of employment. Of which there was none, right now, because he wouldn’t be going back on the road for another week or two, depending.
    “What you’re on your way to is Canada,” Wussy said. “You missed your turn back there.”
    My father ignored him.
    “That asshole Angelo thought he had me last week, the prick,” my father said to me over his shoulder. “I’m in Mike’s. It’s about closing time. All revved up. I figure if I’m smart, I’ll walk, but it’s cold, so I say fuck ’em. I go around the corner where I’m parked. I look up and down the street. Nobody. Just me.”
    “Right,” Wussy said.
    “I get into the car. Pull away from the curb. Look in my rear view and—blip—here comes Angelo in the cruiser. You son of a bitch!”
    “You see that sign, Sam’s Kid?” Wussy said, pointing out the window.
    In fact, I had. It said we were five miles from Speculator, twenty miles from Indian Lake. There hadn’t been any mention of Mohawk.
    “So I whip around the corner, throw the car into park and slide over in the passenger seat. Angelo, he barrels right by. The dumb son of a bitch gets all the way down the block to the dead end, and he sits there. Where the hell did Sammy go, he’s thinking. He’s gotta be.”
    I could tell that Wussy was just waiting for my father to finish his story before pressing his point about the way we’re headed.
    “Finally his backup lights come on, and here he comes, backingall the way down the street, flashing his spot light into the driveways on both sides of the street. I don’t move. I stay right where I am in the passenger seat. Pretty soon he’s right alongside of me and he’s got the light in my eyes.
There
you are, you bastard, he says. I say, Angelo. What’s up. I got your ass, that’s what’s up, he says. I tell him, Angelo, shit is what you got. He says are you gonna sit there and tell me you weren’t just driving this car? Right on the first try, I say. Then who the hell was, he says.”
    My father stopped talking long enough to light a cigarette. We were climbing further up into the mountains, no doubt about it. Wussy was shaking his head.
    “I’m about to say some fucking thing when I look up, and who’s shuffling toward us, not even from here to that tree?”
    My father pointed, but as we were in the middle of the woods, it was impossible to know which tree he had in mind.
    “Untemeyer,” he said, when neither Wussy nor I offered to solve the riddle. “I say, Meyer, where the hell’d you go? He comes right around and gets in behind the wheel. To pee, he says, not that it’s any of
your
fucking business. What’s Angelo want? He wants to get me for driving drunk, I say. How can you be driving when I’m driving, Meyer says. We can’t see Angelo because of the light, but we can tell he’s fuming.
    “That’s pretty funny,” I said, hoping to put an end to the story.
    “That’s not the funny part,” my father insisted.
    “No,” Wussy agreed. “It isn’t.”
    “The funny part is Meyer’s never owned a car in his life and he doesn’t have a license either. Everybody in town knows that but Angelo, and Angelo knows it too if he could think of it.”
    We came to a “T” intersection and my father stopped to dry his tears on his shirt sleeve. “Ah, shit,” he concluded. “Life, right?”
    “Life. Right,” Wussy said, grinning over at him.
    My father looked left, then right. “All right, Wuss.” He grinned back at his old friend. “Where the hell are we?”
    It took us a little over an hour to get back to Mohawk. Just outside the city limits, my father pulled over and let me take us in. When I parked behind Wussy’s pickup, which was right where he’d left it in front of the Night Owl, Wussy said, “So long, girls. I’m not going to be party to no breaking and entering.”
    In fact, my father had opened the trunk and located his tire iron.
    “I’m glad you finally come home, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said. “Time somebody else was the Rockhead’s lookout. I’ll come visit you both in jail.”
    “You never did