The Risk Pool

must know this welterweight from Syracuse. “Hall,” he kept saying. “He fights under the name of Hall.” My father got a charge out of the idea. “That’s the name my wife and I fight under,” he said.
    Back then, they had enjoyed making up, and if they’d thrown things at each other, the broken pieces could always be swept off the floor later. He never bought anything without considering its possible use as a missile, and he knew that there were few purer pleasures in the world than throwing things. During the long months of his nocturnal raids, he had considered the whole thing good fun, and he looked forward to eventual, inevitable reconciliation with my mother. They were both Catholics, at least nominally, and my mother had said till death. Even her calling the police had seemed fair enough. After all, she had few weapons to fight him with, and besides, he had enjoyed eluding cops. It did not occur to him that she might really mean the things she said about him—that she considered him a menace, that she would keep their son away from him for the same reason that she would not let him play in traffic or pet rabid dogs.
    Could it be true that he was a dangerous man? He had killed men in France and Germany, but their deaths were more the result of their own stupidity or bad luck than any deadly efficiency on his part. The men who had fought beside him had never considered him careless, or at least hadn’t said they did. He had been neither cowardly nor foolhardy, just dependable. How had his wife gotten the idea he was a dangerous man?
    Still, when the first bullet slammed into his convertible, it punctuated a thought that had been gnawing at him all the way home from the river. He had not been much of a caretaker for me during the last twenty-four hours. He hadn’t intended to do such a bad job. He hadn’t thought that it would
be
a job. In fact, he had intended the kidnapping—an idea he thought of and acted uponin the same instant—to demonstrate that a boy
needed
a father. Instead, everything had turned out badly. When we were a few blocks from home, he had looked over at me and seen the unavoidable evidence of his guardianship. He had snatched a clean, happy, reasonably well-adjusted boy and was returning less than twenty-four hours later a dirty little vagabond in wet sneakers and a torn t-shirt, whose poison-ivied legs and arms were raked raw, whose eyes were nearly swollen shut with crying over the loss of a two-dollar gadget. And if all that and getting shot at weren’t enough, he had to listen to a lecture from Wussy. My father still remembered it years later.
    “You know where I found him when I looked out the window this morning?” Wussy wanted to know. “Standing on a rock in the middle of the river. You’re pretty damn lucky we weren’t bringing home a drowned corpse. I don’t blame her for shooting at you.”
    “She came closer to you than me,” my father pointed out weakly.
    “People usually do. That’s how come I live out in the country.”
    They drove the rest of the way there in silence, contemplating how different it was in a car with no windshield, dodging tiny windblown shards of glass. When they pulled up in front of the trailer, Wussy got out and unloaded the gear. “Shot one of my reels,” Wussy observed, holding it up.
    My father wasn’t interested. “What would you do?” he said.
    Wussy shrugged.
    “Maybe I should stay away from him for a while.”
    “For a while wouldn’t hurt,” Wussy said. “Until he grows up a little.”
    “Or until I do?”
    “No point waiting
that
long,” Wussy said. He studied the convertible from his cinderblock step. “
First
thing I’d do is get a new car. This one’s full of holes.”

4
    And so he went away again.
    No one knew where. For a while my mother got phone calls from people he owed money. They wanted to know how come he disappeared, and when she told them she neither knew nor cared they only believed the last part. Some wanted to know if she felt like squaring his debts.
    In fact, my father left town so quickly and quietly that there was considerable speculation about whether he’d really left at all, especially after the story of how my mother had shot his car got around. About two weeks after his disappearance, two policemen in street clothes rang our bell and wondered if they might ask my mother some questions. There’d been talk at the phone company, so she wasn’t surprised.
    They wanted to know