The Risk Pool

years earlier when he was cleaning fish, remarking with genuine regret that he was not the kind of boy you could take places.
    She much preferred me to Satch, the previous bartender at Mike’s, who had been slow to lend an arm and whose overall intelligence she had considered suspect. His slender, hairy chest had reminded her of Byron’s. He’d not only made an indifferent Manhattan, he was very slow about it, leaving her to shout and bang on the back of the booth in frustration until her hands throbbed. She showed me her clawlike hands as evidence, and it was easy to believe that they throbbed all right, each finger going in several different arthritic directions. She had been overjoyed when Satch was canned, she said, indeed could not have been happier without having been informed that he had died and goneto hell, even though my own Manhattans were not such a great improvement, truth be told. But I wasn’t to worry about it, because I was a good young fellow. She approved of me, as she could not approve of Satch and the hateful gorilla of a taxicab driver they always sent for her. As I balanced Mrs. Agajanian on my arm, out of the bar and into the gorilla’s waiting taxi, I always wondered how the old woman reconciled her fondness for me with the soaked booth she always left as a token of her affection.
    The Schwartz flat was located in a section of town I was not particularly well acquainted with although, according to my mother, my grandfather had once owned a house there and sold it in order to buy the one I’d grown up in. The streets west of Main were older and less symmetrical than those east. They turned around and in upon themselves, as if they’d been laid out by a drunk and then paved by a man who understood him perfectly. Small leather shops, many now closed and empty, rose up on street corners above long rows of two-family houses built much too close to one another, the broken concrete walkways between them so narrow that a broad-shouldered man would have to go sideways, tripping over the rusted tricycles and old inner tubes that inevitably collected there. Most of the houses themselves were sturdy and well built, among the oldest in the city, but they were run-down and neglected now, like the shops and green-fronted, dark neighborhood groceries, abandoned when those who had patronized them moved to newer sections of the city and did their shopping along the highway. Only the occasional tan brick church survived the general exodus, indeed benefited, to some extent, by the razing of a shabby house or two nearby, so that the church parking lot could be expanded, or some ambitious rector’s plan for a church hall, named in his own honor, be implemented. Thus on Sundays the very people who had long before left the neighborhood to welfare renters returned to shake their perplexed heads at the old neighborhood and wonder how they’d ever managed to live in each other’s laps like that. When they went inside the church, they locked their cars.
    The Schwartz flat was on Becker Street at the bottom of a dangerous hill that claimed the life of about one child a year, usually in a sledding accident. There were steeper hills around, but Becker Street’s was a long quarter-mile slope with but a single intersection at the bottom, ideal for sledding, that activity’s strict illegality notwithstanding. As a boy, I had not been allowed tocross Main with my sled, and my mother had shown me newspaper clippings in defense of her intractability. These had often contained grainy
Mohawk Republican
photos, snowy because
Republican
photos were always snowy, and because these happened actually to picture snow. If you looked at these pictures long and closely enough, and read the captions and stories that accompanied them, you might be able to ascertain that the dark mass in the center was a crazily angled automobile and that the dark something jutting up from under its wheels was a child’s sled. In a way, these vague white photographs did frighten me, leaving totally to the imagination as they did the condition, even the whereabouts, of the victim.
    Coming down the same hill in my father’s convertible, I guessed that there were still all sorts of tragedies on Becker Street. The fact that the Claudes were now reduced to living there was perhaps among them, because these second-story flats were a far cry from the house they’d owned on Third Avenue. The hallway that led up to the Schwartz apartment was dank and