The Risk Pool

yet.” He looked over his thick glasses down the bar to where Claude Schwartz was sitting. “Seven-one-seven,” he said, nodding. “July seventeenth. Half of Mohawk played seven-one-seven that day.”
    Skinny Donovan was there with us at the end of the bar. He was drinking Vichy water trying to dry out before Monday. My father had gotten him on as a flagman on a nonunion road job in Speculator on the condition that he wouldn’t be drunk and shaking come Monday when he started. He looked like he wasn’t going to be drunk, but he still had the shivers pretty bad and everybody waskidding him. Wussy had been in, looked him over and shaken his head, glad Skinny wouldn’t be landing no airplanes with those flags.
    “Seven-one-seven,” Skinny nodded. “I played it for about a week myself, even though I should’ve knew better. It only works for suicides if they die.”
    “It popped just last week,” Untemeyer observed. “You should have stuck with it.”
    “For ten years?” Skinny said.
    “How many numbers you had in ten years?”
    “Never one,” Skinny admitted sadly.
    “There you go,” Untemeyer said. “You hadn’t been fickle, you’d have had the one, anyway.”
    Skinny drank his Vichy and considered this seriously. “I could use the money,” he said, as if he harbored a secret hope that Untemeyer might give him credit for
wanting
to bet seven-one-seven all those years and pay off on the intention.
    Things always picked up when Untemeyer came in and it took me fifteen minutes or so to get back down to Claude at the other end of the bar. When I finally did, his glass was empty and he’d written me a message on his damp cocktail napkin. It contained his address and the following: “My wife’s name is Lisa. Come see us. My mother lives with us, too.”
    “I will, Claude,” I said, folding the napkin and pocketing it.
    We shook again, then, and Claude climbed down off his bar stool. I didn’t really expect him to speak, and when he did, it surprised me so, I made him repeat what he’d said, though I’d heard his soft voice clearly. The rasping that had characterized his speech for so long after he’d tried to hang himself was gone now, but he still spoke, out of desire or necessity, at little more than a whisper. Even so, I’d heard him clearly answer the question I’d been wanting to ask ever since I’d recognized him as his father.
    “He never came back,” Claude Schwartz said, as if this fact too belonged in his private
Guinness Book of World Records
.
    By the time I got off work, went home, and discovered the napkin in my pocket, the ink had smeared so badly that the address was unreadable. Fortunately, Claude’s mother was listed in the Mohawk directory and I was pretty sure the address was the same Claude had written on the napkin. When I called, it was hismother who answered and said, yes of course it was Ned Hall, and that I was to come right over. I was expected for pizza. When I said I’d have to take a rain check until the following evening, she said that would be fine and did I like pizza? I said I did. Very much.
    The next afternoon I had Mike let me go home half an hour early so I could go home and shower off some of the beer smell. It also happened to be Wednesday, which meant that I carried about my person the odor of urine. Mrs. Agajanian had again come to visit just long enough to toss back four murderous Manhattans and pee in her booth. And, just as in the case of the previous Wednesdays, she was steadier on her way out than in, her knotted, dry old bones lubricated somewhat, her face frozen into a savage, determined grin, her stockings dripping. Any right-minded person who hadn’t the responsibility of sponging down her booth afterward would have admired her.
    Every Wednesday after that first one, she demanded more and more of my time, and she was militantly heedless of whatever else happened to be going on in the bar. I never sat down, but this did not stop her from telling me a long story each time I delivered a Manhattan. Ten years had not diminished by a jot her resentment against Byron, her homosexual and utterly fictional husband, who, I was informed, was now living somewhere in Puerto Rico, having “sunk his faggot ass in butter.” She had stories about half a dozen other eccentric relatives too and she always told anecdotes about them as if they were famous people who needed no introduction. She only once mentioned the invisible son I’d sat on ten