The Risk Pool

everything. What happened the afternoon my father’s car got shot, why she had done it, and had we seen my father since. By the time they got around to us, they’d already talked to the neighbors, and all the eyewitnesses had agreed, at least in the beginning, that just the car had been shot. But the more they were questioned, the less certain they became. Maybe my father
had
been shot, they conceded hopefully. Or maybe the man who had slumped down in the backseat had been. Yes, my father
had
driven the wounded automobile away, stopping a couple of blocks down the street to change the tire my mother had exploded, but they couldn’t be absolutely certain nobody had been hit. Sometimes people got shot and weren’t aware of it until later. Maybe my father had crawled off someplace and died. Or maybe my mother caught up with him later and finished him off.
    The policeman wanted to see the gun my mother used, unaware that it had been confiscated by the patrolman who answered the call the afternoon of the shooting. And they wantedto talk to me about the kidnapping. I told them all about the three fish I’d caught and how my father had only caught his thumb. I informed them that another man called Norm—a.k.a. Wussy—had gone with us, and described the little trailer he lived in outside of Mohawk. They must have located poor Wussy, because the next morning F. William Peterson called to say that the official investigation into my father’s disappearance had been concluded after a friend told the cops it was my father’s intention to head out west and work on the interstates. A car answering a pretty accurate description—one side full of bullet holes—had gassed up at a Thruway station near Utica and the driver had purchased a case of oil.
    “How can people think such things?” my mother said to F. William Peterson. To her mind there was a real distinction between shooting a man’s car and shooting a man. She had never given anyone reason to think she was capable of the latter.
    Even though it had quickly become clear that there was no connection between her assault on the convertible and my father’s subsequent disappearance, the resulting gossip was the beginning of serious trouble for my mother, who began to suffer acute anxiety attacks. When they got so bad she couldn’t stop shaking, the doctor prescribed librium, which calmed her way down. She mostly stared at a spot on the wall about a foot above the Victrola, and her work at the telephone company suffered. But when it came time to renew the prescription, she decided to start attending church instead. As a girl she’d always felt serene in church, a feeling not unlike a couple libriums, without the drowsy side effects.
    Once she started going to church, she couldn’t stop. She attended Mass the way drunks went on binges. She couldn’t get enough. In church she felt safe and secure. Not even my father would dare violate its cool, dark sanctity. She took me along for company.
    Our Lady of Sorrows was white, Mission style, simple and clean, without any ornate ostentation. I loved its long side aisles and rich stained-glass windows. In the early morning, the little church, never locked, would be nearly black inside, except for the thin crease of light beneath the sacristy door. The old Monsignor, our pastor, always arrived before his parishioners. As the eastern skylightened, the windows along one side took on color, and the church would grow warm and still, except for the creaking of an occasional pew or clicking of beads. The quiet and beauty of Our Lady of Sorrows reminded me of the woods that morning I was alone on the river before my father and Wussy woke up. More than anything I wanted to investigate the sacristy, the church’s inner recess where the old priest and altar boys clothed in rich vestments plotted the mass for the rest of us. I asked my mother what you needed to do to become an altar boy, and the question made her very happy, as if for the first time she believed that my father had really gone out west and the two of us were safe.
    In due course I was enrolled in catechism class where I effortlessly distinguished myself, and by 1957, when I entered the fifth grade, I was cataloging an impressive list of plagiarized venial sins every Saturday afternoon in the dark confessional. I held my hands over my ears to avoid hearing the exact same confession from whatever boy happened to occupy the opposite cubicle of our three-seater, the old