The Risk Pool

dark, until she’d spoken, I’d not been able to tell her from her mother, and even when she did speak I’d heard a bitter inflection in the tone of her voice that was directly traceable to Hilda Ward. Tomorrow, a month from now, a year, I’d wake up and find my Tria—and Jack Ward’s Tria—gone, the transformation complete. It would take no longer than it took for the young Hilda Smythe of the library photographs to go from young woman to mummy. Perhaps Tria herself could see it coming. Perhaps that was what she’d been trying to warn me about when she said that things at the Ward house were always normal. She bore the legacy of a superficially charming and opportunistic father, of a mother shrunken and ruined for life and love by the father she idealized, a third-rate chronicler of arcane history and, apparently, a first-rate deceiver of worshipful children. And, to my shame, there was one other person I held against her. As she herself had remarked, it was too terrible not to be true.
    My beloved was what she came from. After a few blessed years, sustained by some conjurer’s trick, I would not be able to tell mother and daughter apart in a well-lit room. And then what would I probably do? Probably what her father did, or what my father did, or some unimaginative synthesis of these two Mohawk paradigms. For if Tria was her mother, then what on earth was I? Wasn’t I the same shabby conjurer’s trick? Had Tria come looking for me earlier in the evening, gone from dim smoky bar to dim smoky bar, surveying from the entryways the shadowyfigures down the long bars, spying my father and me on adjacent stools, hunched over sweating beer bottles, wouldn’t she too have been granted a glimpse of the future? And as she came toward us through the smoke, would she not fear for a brief instant that she had my father and me confused, and known in that moment what the future held—herself alone in her mother’s house, except for the old woman, truly old and sick now, shrunken doll-size in her king-size bed, while I sported with Marion and Mohawk’s other sporting men at the Big Bend Hunting Lodge?
    And somewhere in this awful mix, a monster, slouching among our separate existences. Made terrible because, unlike Tria and myself, he had no blueprint to follow, nothing clear in his mind to become. Nothing. Zero. But nothing grown huge, as big as a house, with one simple crazy philosophy—“What’s mine is mine”—and imagining he could wring it free, whatever was desired, by brute force, by will.
    These were the alcoholic phantoms that pursued me along the narrow Mohawk avenues until finally, the third time I arrived in front of the house that contained my mother’s flat, I climbed the back stairs and found her sitting quietly puffy-eyed at the kitchen table, as patiently despairing and hopeful as she had been the afternoon my father had returned me, scratched and swollen and riddled with poison ivy, to her doorstep for repair. Her eyes now contained that same terrible sadness, submerged deep and quiet. And for a brief moment I felt I was her son again, the son of this strange woman who had tried her best to save me from probably.

38
    The following Monday afternoon, Tree came in after his shift out at the campsite where during the summer he still sat in the same little shack and sold parking tickets to bathers. The arm he dangled out the window was berry-brown, the other fish-white, likethe rest of him. I drew him a beer and he nodded to Irma, Mike’s wife, when she emerged from the steamy kitchen and glowered at him for no particular reason. Tree was scared of women in general and very frightened of Irma. For as long as he could remember, he’d always had at least one big woman mad at him, and over the years he’d come to the conclusion that there must be something about his looks that did it to them, especially the big ones. Irma was a sizable woman, though not nearly as big as the two women he’d married. He gave her wide berth, just the same, as if he feared he might fall in love with Irma and marry her too. Her glowering at him all the time struck Tree as a dare. She glowered the same way at everybody, but her genuine ill humor had special meaning for Tree, who mistook it for foreplay. When he spoke, it was to a neutral spot on the wall that neither included nor excluded Irma. “Some r-r-ruckus over to The Bachelors last night.”
    The Bachelors was a nightspot on the lake road that catered to phony