The Risk Pool

might go to jail, he just shrugged. He’d been there before. And it couldn’t be for too long. He’d just have to make sure he served his time during the winter, which was his bad season anyhow. “I’m all right when I’m working,” he said. “If it wasn’t for winters I’d be governor.”
    In fact, he did seem to do better once he went back on the road. He’d usually wander into Mike’s Place about the time I got off and we’d have a beer before I headed home to dinner with my mother. Some nights he’d eat a hamburg steak at the Mohawk Grill or a plate of spaghetti at Mike’s, and then say he was going home. He almost never did, but I could tell he was too tired after the long day of road construction to get into much trouble. Occasionally he’d go home with the intention of showering and going out again, only to fall asleep on the sofa for a few hours, long enough to make the shortened night less dangerous. And when he stuck to beer he was okay. Shortly after my return, he started up with Eileen again, too, which I considered a good sign. “She’s a good girl,” he said. “She’s not the best-
looking
girl you ever saw, but she’s all right, just the same. We stay off the subject of her asshole kid … we do okay.”
    “What’s he up to these days?” I asked, feeling little more than obligatory curiosity, thankful that since my return to Mohawk our paths hadn’t crossed and a little fearful that inquiring after his health might have the unintended effect of producing Drew Littler in the flesh. My first week at Mike’s Place, I kept expecting him to turn up, especially when it turned out that Eileen was working lunches, but he never did. I’d often thought about asking her about him, but I knew he’d been in and out of trouble and a variety of institutions, so I thought. I’d spare her. Now I was glad.
    “Oh, he’s up to about here,” my father said, putting his maimed hand about a foot over his own head. “Like always. At the moment he’s the guest of the state. They caught him trying to break into some joint down the line about three in the morning, the dumb son of a bitch. He couldn’t work for a living, naturally.”
    “How long is he in for?”
    “Not near long enough,” my father said. “I got him a couple jobs myself, but things always wound up missing. It was never him, of course. Steal? Not him.”
    It didn’t take my father much to get revved up on the subject of Drew Littler, and when he recalled conversations they’d had, he always rendered these dramatically, playing both parts, capturing the rhythms of the original discussion.
    “Then how come as soon as you get hired things always start disappearing, I said to him one day. He’d just been fired, as usual. How the hell should I know, he says. Right. How the hell should you know anything, Zero. Things just vanish. They get up and walk away. As soon as you get hired, all this shit just up and walks off. It never did
before
you started working there, but now it just can’t stay put.”
    “You know what he says to me, the big dumb son of a bitch? He says, that’s right, Sammy. That’s fuckin’ right.”
    By this time my father was usually purple. One incident would remind him of another, and before long the veins in his neck would be pulsing. “We got into it about a year ago. He doesn’t say shit to me anymore. He’s that smart anyway, the dumb bastard.”
    “You can’t tell his mother he’s no good, either.” I could tell he was unable to stop himself now. “She knows. She’s got to. But do you think she’d listen when anybody tries to tell her? Not a chance. If he’s not stealing money out of her purse, she’s giving it to him so he won’t have to. Can you imagine stealing from your own mother?”
    I said no, but he wasn’t really talking to me. Drew Littler stories consumed him, and once he got started a listener wasn’t strictly necessary. He’d been through them all with Wussy and Mike and everybody else, and they never let him even get started anymore, cutting him off before he could get up a head of steam, for which he thanked them. Don’t get me started on
that
dumb son of a bitch.
    But I was a fresh listener, and I had to hear these stories several times during the course of the summer. It didn’t take me long to realize that Drew Littler had become almost larger than life (no small matter) with my father, representing to him all that was wrong with things. It did little good to