The Risk Pool

and F. William Peterson’s—that people who surrendered territory to my mother seldom won it back. I’d often wondered whether my stubbornness in refusing her demands was inherited from Sam Hall or an instinctive male response to emotional black-mail. Either way, I knew I could count on an almost unlimited reserve of stony resistance. I also suspected that this current confrontation had been brought on by the morning’s congeniality, an action that demanded an equal and opposite reaction. Thirty days out of every month she reassured herself that things were fine. On the thirty-first, she needed to consider an equally distorted negative reality, plunge herself into despair and fury, to the outermost inconsequential limits of her own continuing dream.
    She stood before me now, a full head shorter than I, an angry, self-pitying child full of terrible adult knowledge. “Why do you do it?” she said. “Why must you play Sam Hall’s fool?”
    “I guess he and I are just simpatico,” I said, holding up two fingers, wondering at my own cruelty, its ability to surface so quickly, so powerfully, so intelligently focused on the existing scar, already red and inflamed.
    Knowing right where to plant the dagger is a special gift.
    Since Eileen was the one who had called, I figured my father was probably at Mike’s Place, but I was wrong. Mike hadn’t seen him. Somebody else said they’d seen him down at Greenie’s with half a load on. At Greenie’s, the bartender said he’d been there, tried to pick a fight and then left, thank Christ. That had been half an hour earlier. I thought about calling my mother to see if she knew where Eileen had been calling from, but even if she had, the trail was certain to be cold by now. Instead, I called Tria to see if she’d changed her mind about letting me take her to dinner. If so, it’d have to be a late one. Her voice sounded a million miles away.
    “Is anything wrong?” I said.
    “With me or you?”
    “With us.”
    “We have something of a situation out here, actually,” she said.
    “That makes two of us,” I said, instinctively not liking the sound of her “situation,” glad for one of my own. I also had the odd feeling that someone was in the room with her, maybe even listening in on the conversation. “How about we exchange stories later?”
    “Maybe,” she said.
    I tried a couple more likely spots without any luck, but I found his car right where I’d left it that morning, which meant that either he was in town or he’d recruited Wussy to drive him. I didn’t mind not finding him right away, but I hoped Eileen hadn’t got frustrated waiting for me and called my mother again. After forty-five minutes or so I circled back and stopped into Mike’s again on the off chance, and there he was at the far end of the bar, big as life. Eileen wasn’t around, which meant that calling me was her last official act of intervention.
    Mike came over when he saw me. “He just come in,” he said, guiltily, as if I suspected he’d hid my father in the back room the first time I was there. Sam Hall had all the moves of a small-town alcoholic whose wife knows all of his haunts but, due to the complicity of bartenders, still can’t find him.
    “Son!” my father thundered when he spied me. In front of him he had an empty shot glass and a half-gone beer chaser. He himself was completely gone.
    I slid onto an empty stool next to him. A guy I didn’t know and who looked even drunker than my father leaned forward to see if he could bring me into meaningful focus.
    “Say hello to Roy,” my father said, leaning back on his stool so Roy and I could shake, nearly losing his balance in the process. “Roy’s a no-good drunk,” he explained. “Like me.”
    “Bullshit,” Roy said. “Your old man’s the best.”
    “Right,” I said, and Roy gave my father a hug.
    “You know how come?” Roy wanted to know, and he waited politely for me to ask how come.
    “How come?” I said.
    “He’ll buy a goddamn drink, that’s how come. He ain’t tight. You come in … Sam Hall’s at the bar … you don’t even have to put your hand in your pocket. There’s already a drink in frontof you. What’s this, you say. Sam Hall, the bartender says. Am I right, Mike?”
    Roy and my father looked around for Mike, who had been right there, and recently too, though he wasn’t there now.
    “You want to know who’s really the best?” my father said.
    “You tell me,” Roy said.