The Risk Pool

said, supplying the example I was missing.
    “Zero just got out of college too,” my father said.
    “Right,” Drew Littler said. “I got a degree in whaddycallit … rehabilitation.”
    “So what’s the first thing he does when he gets home? He goes to visit his mother’s dresser drawer.”
    “You suppose we could stop this, girls,” Wussy said, “before it starts?”
    “Stop what?” my father said.
    “I just came over to say hello to Ned and buy him a beer,” Drew Littler said. “Not mouth with you.”
    “Buy us all a beer,” my father suggested. “You got about two hundred bucks, right?”
    “I spent some of it,” Drew Littler said, meeting my father’s gaze squarely.
    “Naturally,” my father said.
    “What I’ve been trying to figure out for twenty years,” Drew Littler said, “is why it’s any of
your
fucking business.”
    “Well,” my father said slowly, “Zero, I’m not the smartest guy that ever was. But if I thought about something that simple for twenty years and still came up empty I’d be ashamed to admit it. Of course that’s just me. You could be different. In fact, you are different.”
    Just then somebody across the room called my father’s name, and when he didn’t answer a chorus went up. “Your goddamn quarter, Sammy. You want to play or not?”
    “It’s not
my
quarter,” my father said, reluctant to break away from his grinning and staring contest with Drew Littler.
    “Bullshit,” Wussy called. “You put yours down same time I did. Go play.”
    “Come on over,” Drew Littler nodded toward the dark booth across the room. “I’ll introduce you to this girl I’m with.”
    For a terrible moment I imagined that when I arrived I’d find that it was Tria with him. “Good,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
    I watched all three of them cross the room, Drew Littler to a booth, my father and Wussy to the pool table. Then I went into the men’s room and sat on the closed toilet seat inside the single stall. Somebody in ankle-high work boots followed me in, saw the stall was occupied and walked out again. Before the door closedI heard the billiard balls crack and my father bellow, outraged at the idea that the kid in the T-shirt had made two balls off the break. Normally my father never bet more than a drink, at least on himself, when it came to pool. But this was a sure-lose situation, the kind that would tempt him. The skinny kid in the thin T-shirt would say something that would rub my father the wrong way and he’d decide to teach the kid a lesson. He had the fresh ten he’d just won off Wussy’s game and it would be on the table before he even thought about it. With luck, losing it would engross him for a few minutes.
    You couldn’t do him any real good, of course. Wussy, who played my father like a drum, knew that. You could slow him down some, but you couldn’t change his direction for long. My return to Mohawk had slowed him a pace or two, and by appearing tonight I had postponed, perhaps, the savage bender he would still go on tomorrow or next week or next month. If I played all my cards right, went over and talked friendly with Drew Littler, I might even prevent hostilities between them tonight. But not forever. Probably not even for very long. The strange part was that my sympathies were, for the most part, with Drew. After all, whatever happened at the Littler house was none of Sam Hall’s business. For as long as I could remember my father had caused trouble over there, sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, offering advice when none was called for, giving orders where he had no authority. For twenty years he’d called Drew Littler “Zero” and half a dozen other derisive nicknames. If the boy had had enough, who could blame him?
    But when push came to shove, as it had more than once and would again, I would side with my father. Not because he was right about Drew Littler. Not because Drew had always been lazy, sullen, stupid, and untrustworthy. I would side with my father because I too wanted Drew Littler brought down. Though we never discussed it, I’d often suspected that my father felt the same physical loathing that came over me in waves whenever the boy was around. Even that first afternoon when I had ridden on the back of his motorcycle up on the winding tree-lined drive and we two had gazed at the Wards’ white jewel house, I had felt it. An intense loathing that went far beyond rationality. The moment Drew Littler