The Risk Pool

nothing but stare at it.”
    “Good.” My father pushed the plate toward him. “Eat it. I keep seeing Skinny and Numb Nuts.”
    “You look better than you did an hour ago,” Wussy observed.
    “I feel worse.”
    “Good.”
    My father winked at me halfheartedly. “Eats my spaghetti and insults me.”
    “Sorry to walk out on you,” Wussy said. “But I can’t be around Roy Heinz.”
    “He always speaks well of you,” my father said.
    Wussy nodded. “He go to the bathroom on you again?”
    “Sort of,” my father said. “Not
on
me exactly.”
    Suddenly something clicked. “Heinz,” I said.
    “You knew his kid,” Wussy said. “You was in the golf ball business together. Willie Heinz his name was.”
    My father came back from the men’s room looking a little better.
    Wussy finished my father’s spaghetti and pushed the plate away. “I got this,” he said when my father took out some money.
    “It’s only fair,” my father agreed.
    “I’d let the kid pay for it except I figure he’s almost as bad luck as you.”
    “Not really,” my father said, looking me over, rather fondly it seemed to me, though more sensibly than his earlier drunken ecstasy.
    “How could he come from you and not be trouble?”
    “I don’t know,” my father admitted.
    “I think I’ll go home anyhow,” Wussy said. “When you start whistling into the bottom of whiskey bottles—”
    “No more,” my father promised. “Beer only.”
    “Not me,” Wussy said. “You drink with him, Sam’s Kid.”
    My father bought a round before he could leave though, andthen I bought one, and we all settled in. Wussy said there must be a full moon out—Sam’s Kid actually bought a round.
    “It’s his last, too,” said my father, who always embarrassed me by refusing to let me be part of the rotation. Sometimes, I could sneak a round in, if he hadn’t told the bartender not to take my money, but mostly I drank for free, paying only in good-natured insults received. The men my father drank with had all been told I was a college kid saving for tuition, which exempted me from everything but humiliation. Busting my balls about being a cheapskate was considered good sport. “We gotta get him back to school before he turns into one of us for good,” my father warned, “and his mother blames me.”
    “Every time I think of her,” Wussy said, “I pray that after she shoots you she’ll be satisfied. Speaking of shooting, the table’s open.”
    Nights like these, it was a very real possibility that I
would
become one of them, permanently, irrevocably. Here I was, twenty-four years old, and less than twenty hours earlier I had become the lover of the very girl who had haunted my imagination off and on for at least a dozen years. And somehow, without even thinking about it, I had reneged on my promise to call her back, take her out to dinner, preferring instead to be sucked into the maelstrom of another drunken evening with two middle-aged, beat-up tomcats. My father and Wussy were Mohawk men, which meant that somewhere along the line each had turned his back on a woman. Many had turned their back on more than one. Most now realized that in doing so they’d fucked up. Some would even admit it when they were drunk enough. A few, like Skinny Donovan, would try to return thirty years after the fact, to women who didn’t even exist anymore, who had gone evil or horny or crazy with waiting and raising kids, or had just dried up from working two hard jobs. Other guys, like Tree, succumbed to confusion, never sure whether he’d got his most recent case of the clap from his wife or his mistress. Since each had been the other, and might be again, it probably didn’t matter. Somehow he’d got them both to love him, but on Saturday nights he preferred to drink beer and shoot pool and play cards with men who had similar stories to tell.
    What we shared—yes, I would be one of them tonight—was something not to be underestimated. We could all boast, this night, anyway, that no matter how messed up we were, at leastour lives were not being dictated by women. Offered tender breasts and warm pussies, by God we showed them we could not be so easily bought. Never mind that in some cases the offer was twenty years old and nineteen rescinded, we were still making a point regarding the female population. A declaration of independence. We could do without them, because they were only women, after all.
    And we were men. We had business. And with