The Risk Pool

a blue baseball game tilting down from the corner above the bar, we tended to the business of being men, brown sweating bottles of beer lined up in phalanxes, bought not as needed, but in rounds, the real drinkers setting a pace, like the lead runners in a road race, finding a stride, feeling instinctively the race’s length, its rhythms. Our collective composition always changing, as somebody heard somebody was somewhere and went there to find him, get that ten-spot he was owed, somebody else slipping into the vacated space at the bar, ensuring welcome by buying a round or promising to get the next one. Sometimes loud—all of us shouting at once, pointing at the replay on the blue screen—sometimes hushed, conspiratorial, can I take twenty till Monday, I wouldn’t ask, but …
    It was all rhythm and stride and knowing when to move, what it would take to get you from where you were to another spot just like it a hundred yards down the street where they had two pool tables instead of the one. You had to know how many quarters were lined up under the bumpers and whose they were, who was in the middle of something, who was waiting for somebody to show up. You began to sense when the forces that could cause you to pick your money up off the bar would become greater than those that kept you rooted to a particular stool. When you understood the rhythms, the subtleties made sense. You could predict that when somebody in your party got up to take a leak, it would set in motion a string of small causes and effects that would have you out the door and in the street in, say, five minutes, which meant that if you had a full bottle of beer in front of you, you either got to work or you left it.
    It had always been the rhythms of my father’s life that most mystified me. There had been no predicting whether he’d turn left or right. You didn’t know where he was headed because he hadn’t told you, and he hadn’t told you because he thought you knew, or should have known, or could have figured it out if you’dbeen paying attention. But now, evenings with my father and Wussy and whoever else we managed to pull into our loose circle made perfect sense, and when we all headed out Greenie’s front door at eleven I knew whether we’d be turning left for The Glove or right for Mike’s Place. Spookier still, when my father swung around on his barstool and said, “Well?” I knew what he meant, even when he was harkening back to some earlier conversation left unresolved two hours earlier. I can only say that such moments were magic for me and they made me grin at him so stupidly, so drunkenly, so affectionately, that I had all I could do not to tell him that we were becoming simpatico.
    “Simpatico,” I told him later that night. We were on our third bar after Mike’s Place. Wussy had left us to go home twice and managed to find us again. We’d run into Tree and Roy Heinz and half a dozen other minions, all of whom had fallen away for the moment—to the men’s room, the pool table, the cigarette machine—leaving my father and me alone together. “That’s what Mom says we are, she and I.”
    He shook his head. “Sounds like one of her words all right. She used to come up with shit like that all the while we were married. You should try coming home after a couple years of shooting people on the other side of the world and then have to listen to your mother talk. About a month and you’re ready to go back. Simpatico.”
    We discussed simpatico for a while, to my mother’s detriment.
    “I never should have done what I did, though,” he said. “She’s wacky. Always was, but I should’ve stuck it out anyhow.”
    “Why?” I said.
    “Because I should’ve, that’s all. I just made all of it worse. Then you came along and I didn’t care about that either. I couldn’t believe it, for one thing. One day she tells me she’s pregnant and the next day, practically, you’re here. France and Germany were forever and a fuckin’ day, and your mother has you in about a week … that’s what it felt like. All the while she’s saying we gotta settle down.”
    He looked at me, bleary-eyed. “I should’ve, too. Nuts as she was, I should’ve stuck it out. I should’ve gone right to the grave with your mother.”
    He thought this over for a while, clearly attracted to the idea of such fidelity. “Or Eileen,” he went on. “You may not like her, but she saved my ass more than once.”
    “I
do
like her,” I said,