The Risk Pool

wondering where he’d gotten the idea that I didn’t.
    “You should,” he said. “She’s the best. Nothing against your mother. But Eileen’s the best. I should go right to the grave with Eileen. That’s what I
would
do, too, if I was any fucking good. Which I’m not.”
    We looked at each other, and I realized that after sobering up some when he stopped with the whiskey, the quantitative effect of the beer was catching up with him. I was pretty far gone myself, and he had about an eight-hour lead.
    “You could contradict me once, if you felt like it,” he said.
    “You don’t want me to,” I said. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
    “Right,” he said. “This is no life. Believe me. Don’t get caught up in this shit. I got nothing. And when I die, that’s what you’ll inherit. It’d been better all around if I’d got mine in France.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    He shrugged, not catching my meaning, or not acknowledging it. “Everybody would have been proud of me. They’d have argued about how great I’d have turned out if I hadn’t got shot.”
    “You can still do what you want,” I said. “You’re what, forty-five?”
    “Forty-seven. And anything I was going to do, I did already.”
    “That’s bullshit,” I said cheerfully.
    “What’m I gonna do now?”
    “How do I know?” I said. “I don’t know what
I’m
going to do.”
    “You won’t either,” he said. “You’ll just wake up one day and it’ll all be done. All fuckin’ done.”
    His eyes looked past me then, and they suddenly became so focused and narrow that the bloodshot whites disappeared altogether, leaving just the gray iris and black pupils. I turned around to see what had focused him. At first I thought it was the pool game, where a little guy in a thin t-shirt was lining up the eight. Everybody else was watching to see if it would drop and you could tell from the interest that there was a lot of side action. Except for my father and me, the only other person in the place who didn’t seem to care what happened to the eight ball was Drew Littler, who’d slipped into a dark booth on the other side of the smoky room. The green felt table and bright light above it were an island of illumination separating him from us. My father was right. He was big as a house.
    “I take it back,” I heard my father say. “I might do a good deed yet, if I could get my hands on a shotgun.”
    The skinny kid in the thin t-shirt dropped the eight, and Wussy, who had been his opponent, handed him a five-dollar bill before coming back over to where we were sitting.
    “I’m getting old, Sam’s Kid,” he said. “Another year or two and I’ll be as over the hill as the rockhead.”
    A guy I didn’t know came over and handed my father two fives.
    Wussy shook his head. “I’m glad to see somebody’s making a profit on my misfortune.”
    “It’s a living,” my father said. “It’d be a good one if I could find people who’d bet on you more regular.”
    “You see your buddy over there?”
    “Yup.”
    “Good. Let’s go someplace else. So far this ain’t been your day. There’s no reason to invite total annihilation.”
    “Too late,” my father said. “Here he comes.”
    “I wisht I’d kept that pool cue,” Wussy said.
    “I wish you had too. Why don’t you go back and get it.”
    “If I thought you could hold your own for thirty seconds, I would.”
    “Hold his own what,” Drew Littler said, coming in on the last part of the conversation. “Hell, Sammy’s an expert on holding his own.”
    He nodded at me, offered a big paw, which I shook.
Christ
, he had gotten big. He wasn’t so good-looking anymore though, and it occurred to me that maybe he never had been. I’d just been impressed. He looked like he’d given up on the weights, his once hard, muscular body had gone to flesh now, though it still looked enormously powerful. His hair was long, almost shoulder length, and darker now, blond only near the ends. It covered his forehead completely, and I couldn’t see whether the big blue vein that used to writhe angrily when he lifted was still there.
    “I hear you went to college,” he said to me. “How’d that turn out?”
    “Pretty good for a while,” I said. “And then badly.”
    “It’s all different around here, huh?”
    I tried to imagine what he might be thinking of. I couldn’t thinkof a single thing that had changed in Mohawk. “It sure is,” I agreed.
    “Look at us,” he