The Risk Pool

road. I doubt he would have said anything to my father or Wussy, but he probably gave them a long arrogant smirk before going into the house. At the time he had some sort of job and a cheap third-floor flat on the west end, but he still showed up two or three times a day, mealtimes, according to my father, since he couldn’t cook and couldn’t afford to eat out. Usually his first stop, before saying hello to anybody, was at the refrigerator, where he’d grab the plastic gallon jug of milk and tip it upright over his mouth. According to my father he could down two quarts that way, his Adam’s apple bobbing rhythmically, machinelike.
    “Don’t be going down there,” Wussy would have warned when he saw my father heading for the ladder.
    “Who died and left you job foreman?”
    “All right,
go
down there, rockhead.”
    “There’s a six-pack of beer in the refrigerator and it’s for us. I know because I put it there. If he’s into it, I’m kicking his ass.”
    By the time my father got to the foot of the ladder, Drew had emerged from the house and gone into the garage, where my father found him sucking on a beer.
    Probably my father gave him the opportunity to put it back. Probably Drew Littler didn’t see much point in returning a half-guzzled beer. My father would have explained that this wasn’t the point. The point was it was
his
beer. The point was he’d been up on the roof all afternoon in the hot sun. The point was they could have used some help. The point was Drew Littler was a worthless cocksucker who didn’t know how to do anything except sponge off his mother and get into trouble. This last point I’m sure he explained to Drew Littler, because he always explained it thoroughly to me when he got going on the subject of Eileen’s son. According to Wussy, Eileen came out and tried to keep them apart, but she didn’t get there soon enough, and Wussy apparently didn’t even come down off the roof. He told me all he could see was my father’s legs dangling about eight inches off the garage floor, going like crazy, as if they were pedaling an invisible bicycle. Drew apparently had him by the throat with one big paw and was squeezing as if he intended to burst my father’s purple face like a grape. Instead, he bashed him in the skull with the half-drunk can of beer and dropped him onto the cold floor. Then Drew Littler got on his motorcycle and roared off.
    If my father thought he’d had it rough with Drew Littler, if he thought that sitting there on the cool garage floor, dazed and covered with beer and tar and sweat and blood from his nose, was as bad as things were going to get, he was mistaken, and he would have known that he was mistaken had he been able to focus on Eileen Littler’s face. Wussy had by then started down the ladder, but he caught a glimpse of her standing over my father and went right back up again. She stood there for a hell of a while; then he heard her mutter, “Good! Sit there!” before storming back into the house.
    Only when she was inside did Wussy climb down off the roof and sit down next to my father up against the wall of the garage.
    My father looked at him. “You didn’t get hurt up there on the roof did you?”
    “No, I’m the nuts,” Wussy said.
    “I’m glad,” my father said, fingering his nose to see if it felt broken.
    “I heard all the noise and figured you were kicking ass. I just come down to keep Eileen off of you.”
    “From now on, she can kiss my ass,” my father said, trying to get to his feet. In the process he kicked the still leaking aluminum can under the car. “At least he didn’t get to drink our beer, anyhow.”
    “What kind of beer’d you buy?” Wussy said.
    “What difference?” my father said, then bent at the waist to look under the car.
    “Don’t be looking under there, just tell me what you bought.”
    “How the hell do I know,” my father said, but his expression had changed.
    “You usually buy Genesee,” Wussy said. “You just got brained with a Budweiser.”
    “So I bought Budweiser, so what?”
    “So when Eileen came back from the store an hour ago she had a six-pack of Budweiser. That’s so what.”
    My father wiped his face on his sleeve. “The principle’s the same. When was the last time
he
ever brought a six-pack of beer over here? When was the last time he bought a loaf of bread? A
slice
of bread?”
    Wussy was grinning at him now, watching him get worked up all over again, even more righteously