The Risk Pool

repentant. Next, she saw a large man of indeterminate breed wearing an absurd hat full of fishhooks, just the sort of companion she imagined my father would select for his son. And finally, she saw me. My rumpled shirt and shorts were filthy, my hair wild from the ride in the convertible. My arms and legs were red and raw, my eyes swollen nearly shut from digging and crying. And she saw too that under the law she was completely helpless since, as F. William Peterson had that day informed her, a father could not be guilty of kidnapping his own son.
    She did not get up at first. My father got out of the car to walk me as far as the porch steps, though he looked a little pale, even before he saw my grandfather’s service revolver, the same one that had already been stuck in his ear once. He stopped, his head cocked, as if listening for something as my mother stood and raised the gun. I heard Wussy say “Jesus!” and he slumped as far down into the backseat as his big body would allow. The first explosion surprised my mother so, she almost dropped the gun. After that, she did better. She shot my father’s car five more times, taking out the windshield and the front tire, neither of which she was particularly aiming at.
    “God damn you, Jenny!” my father exclaimed when the shooting stopped. He had scooted behind the car and was now peering tentatively over the hood. “I think you shot Wussy.”
    “Nope.” Wussy’s voice came from the floor of the rear seat. “Except for just the coronary, I’m okay. She isn’t reloading, is she?”
    “Look at my car,” my father said. The glass from the windshield was all over the street, but for some reason he didn’t look as mad as he’d been when he discovered I’d lost his gadget, though a lot more surprised.
    “Look at my son,” my mother said.
    “Our son,” my father said.
    “You can’t have him.” She was still aiming the gun in his direction, empty now, though she didn’t know it. She had just stopped shooting when it seemed she’d made her point.
    My father was pretty sure she was through, but he couldn’t be certain. The neighbors had all come out on their porches, and he was feeling increasingly self-conscious about being pinned down behind his own ruined car. He’d been shot at before and guessed that my mother wasn’t really trying to hit him, but those were precisely the situations that got you shot. He knew from his experience overseas that if you only got shot by people aiming at you specifically, war wouldn’t have been nearly such a hazardous affair. He’d have felt safer if she’d been aiming at his skull. As things stood, it was the people on the porches across the street who he judged were most vulnerable. Since there was nothing to do but test the water, he slowly stood and when she didn’t shoot he got back in the car. Naturally, it wouldn’t start. “Jesus,” Wussy said from the floor of the backseat.
    Finally the engine turned over. My father leaned over the backseat. “You want to ride up front with me?”
    “I’m fine right here,” Wussy said.
    “Which is how come I call you Wussy,” my father said.
    There must be something about getting shot at that changes the way a man looks at things. According to my mother and some other people who knew him before the war, my father came home from Germany a different man. That was to be expected, of course. What was surprising was that the volley my mother aimed at the white convertible marked the beginning of a long hiatus in their personal conflict instead of escalating it. I honestly doubt he was all that scared, and when I asked him about the incident years later, I think he told me the truth when he said he was less surprised by the bullets burrowing into his car than by the fact that my mother had taken their ongoing differences so seriously. That she should so puzzled him that he even questionedhis behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who had faithfully awaited his return from overseas, now calmly and purposefully blasting away, without visible remorse, in the general direction of his life and property.
    They had always had a rather contentious, combative relationship, and a good fight had never before spoiled things. One night a few months after my father had returned from the war and they’d gone dancing, they were accosted by a drunk who kept insisting that my father