The Risk Pool

now that he suspected he’d fucked up.
    “So,” my father said. “It’s
my
fault, I suppose. All afternoon in the sun fixing her fucking roof, and I’m not supposed to tell him to stay out of the fucking beer. Right?”
    He honked some blood onto the floor of the garage, used his sleeve. “Right? It’s my fault. That’s how come she sides with him. And that’s not crazy enough, you’re on
her
side.”
    “Nope,” Wussy said. “I’m on your side. But I’m going back up on the roof anyways.”
    “Good,” my father said. “Go.”
    According to Wussy he could hear them going at it down there right through the roof. Then a pot or something hit the wall and the back door slammed and my father climbed up the ladder,blasting away at the rate of about three curses per rung. When he arrived he started flinging everything he could lay a hand to off the roof, a few shingles and scraps of tar paper at first, but those were hardly satisfying the way the breeze took them. Then he threw hammers and other tools. Finally, he grabbed the tar bucket by the handle and flung it as hard as he could. Wussy figured it was his intention to throw it clean over the roof of the garage, but it only traveled ten feet before hitting a telephone wire and dropping straight down onto the hood of his convertible. My father walked over to the edge of the gently sloped roof and looked.
    “Go ahead,” Wussy said. “Jump.”
    Instead, my father turned his attention to the remaining rolls of tar paper, which he tossed down into the open car. These were followed by cartons of shingles and a box of black tacks. Then both mops and assorted little shit that had accumulated during the long afternoon—plastic glasses, the lemonade pitcher, a couple of shirts. He threw all of these down into the convertible, and stopped when there was nothing left to throw off except Wussy. Eileen came back out just in time to see him kick the ladder, which hit the convertible at the steering wheel and ended up balancing perfectly, four to five feet on either side of the car. Wings.
    Eileen went back in the house.
    “Fuck it,” my father said.
    It took him a while, but he finally calmed down, and when he did, Wussy said his first words since the tirade began. “One of us is going to have to jump down off this roof,” he suggested. “It’s not so far in the back, and it’s a grassy landing.”
    “Shit,” my father said, peering over. “How come you never stop me when I get like that?”
    Wussy just looked at him.
    “Right,” my father said, disappearing over the side with a thud and a grunt.
    It took them half an hour to get going again, set the ladder back up, shoulder the tar paper back and shingles back topside. Another forty-five minutes to finish.
    Then they drove off without a word to Eileen and my father hadn’t been back in the year and a half before my return to Mohawk, even though later that same week Drew Littler was arrested for breaking and entering and sent to jail. “She’ll kiss myass before I ever set foot in that house again,” he predicted on their way to the junkyard for a new hood. They had to settle for a white one, which was okay by my father. More annoying was the fact that a year later he and Wussy were still finding roofing tacks. Finding them the hard way.
    I think I was the only one concerned about my father that summer. Eileen, who had been worried enough to call me in Tucson, seemed to think he was doing better now. So did Mike, who had seen him at his worst and just about given up on him. But now he was back at work and not worrying about money, and somebody had said that the parents of the girl who’d been hurt in the accident were talking about putting it all behind them and settling out of court. They lived in a ratty trailer on the lake road and the idea of a lump sum right now as opposed to a much larger lump at some indefinite point in the future was growing on them. Thus my father’s prediction that the case would never go to court, which I had taken for bravado, seemed less farfetched. Even F. William Peterson, who refused to discuss the case at all in my mother’s presence, and only vaguely when we had a rare moment alone, seemed optimistic, claiming that other factors had come to light and these were in my father’s favor also. Whatever they were, he didn’t want them getting out, and I’m sure he had communicated nothing to my father. Of course my father’s driver’s license was going to stay