The Risk Pool

good and suspended, except for his drive-to-work privileges, but he’d already adjusted to that by tightening his social circle to the in-town gin mills—Mike’s and the Night Owl and Greenie’s and the VFW and one or two other spots, each only a few blocks from the others and from his flat and thus not very far to drive. You couldn’t really even call it driving, he maintained. If he came out and smelled Angelo, he’d walk.
    He still had the same built-in radar where cops were concerned that had allowed him to torment my mother when I was a little boy, then disappear mere seconds before the cruiser careened around the corner. That radar occasionally failed him now, especially beyond a certain point of drunkenness. Otherwise, he was astonishing. “If I was a cop,” he would sometimes say as we were barreling along, “I’d park my ass right over there.” If I was driving, I’d slow down and look where he was pointing, and sure enough, there underneath the overpass, or behind a stand oftrees, or in an alley there’d be a black-and-white, radar gun poised. If there was nobody behind us, he’d instruct me to slow down to about twenty so we could wave to the cop. If the top was up, he’d yell, “Hello, cocksucker!”, convinced that all cops were lip-readers but that lip-read testimony was inadmissible in court. They couldn’t do shit, the pricks, whether they wanted to or not.
    I’d just look at him.
    “You don’t believe me?” he’d say.
    “Nobody believes you.”
    “I’m right, anyhow.”
    It was undeniable that my father was in better spirits since going back to work. Maybe there was no reason to worry, but I did. Most everybody in Mohawk lived pretty near the edge—of unemployment, of lunacy, of bankruptcy, of potentially hazardous ignorance, of despair—and hence the local custom was that you only worried about people nearest the brink. Otherwise you’d worry
yourself
over the edge in short order, what with so many candidates for concern around. My father had taken a step or two back from the precipice and thereby removed himself from the official “at risk” roster. A month earlier you might have legitimately worried about him, but not anymore. Still, conventional wisdom aside, he didn’t seem quite right to me. He’d become oddly religious, at times quite certain that there was a God, and that this God had it in for Sam Hall. Always a gambler, he’d become obsessed with the laws of probability and was convinced that God was toying with him via the daily number.
    “Two-four-seven,” he’d say to Mike. “How long did I play two-four-seven?”
    “Who the fuck knows?” Mike would say. “Don’t start with this shit again.”
    If Wussy was seated on the next barstool, my father would nudge him. “How long did I play two-four-seven?”
    Wussy would shrug. “Thirty years. How should I know.”
    “Pretty goddamn near,” my father would say seriously. “Day after day after day. Two-four-seven. Two-four-seven.”
    “Right,” Mike said. “And it should have come up every day you played it.”
    My father was immune to sarcasm when on the trail of cosmic injustice. “Four-two-seven. Four-seven-two. Seven-two-four. Seven-four-two. Every combination but two-four-seven. No two-four-seven. Fuck me. I play it forever. Until I can’t take it anymore.I play three-seven-nine. Second week of three-seven-nine and guess what pops?”
    I had considered this a rhetorical question, but my father nudged me. “Guess,” he said.
    “I forget,” I told him. “What was your number?”
    “Two-four-seven.”
    “All right,” I said. “Two-four-seven.”
    “Right the first time,” he said, satisfied. “I bet it wasn’t ten days after I came off it. I bet it wasn’t a
week
.”
    “That’s one more bet you’d lose,” Mike said.
    “Your ass,” my father said. “Some guys get special treatment. Always have.”
    “God hates you?” I said in disbelief, the first time I heard this routine.
    “If he’s half as smart as they say, he’d damn near have to,” Wussy observed.
    “How would
you
explain it?” my father wanted to know. He was willing to defer to my opinion in such matters. I was a college graduate. If God wasn’t fucking him, I should be able to explain things.
    I said I didn’t have an explanation.
    He’d become something of a Calvinist, my father, contending that God had his mind pretty much made up from the beginning. Some people had it all right. Others? He