The Risk Pool

ID’s. Anybody who couldn’t start a fight at the pool hall went out there.
    “Assholes,” Irma said. It was her standard comment.
    “I’m with y-you, Irma,” Tree said, still fixed on the same point on the wall. “You couldn’t p-pay me to go out there. You know what they get for a draw?”
    Nobody knew.
    “Ninety-five cents,” Tree said indignantly. “No b-bigger’n what you get right here. Hell, I’d stay home before I’d p-pay that for a g-goddamn draw.”
    “You should go out to the Holiday Inn,” somebody said. “It’s a buck fifteen.”
    “For a
shot
and beer, right?” Tree said.
    “Shit no. Just the draw.”
    “Shot and a b-beer’d be different,” Tree said.
    “You should go to New York City,” somebody else offered.
    “What the hell for?”
    “What’s a shot’n’beer go for there?”
    The guy who said we should go to New York hadn’t been there himself, but he’d heard about it and said you couldn’t get drunk on less than a week’s pay.
    “What happened at The Bachelors?” I said, so Tree’s original observation would not be lost entirely.
    “Hell of a ruckus is what,” said the guy who told us we should go to New York.
    Tree looked at him blackly. He hadn’t brought up the business at The Bachelors to surrender the tale to an interloper. “B-bouncer b-busted up a couple kids around midnight. Tossed ’em out in the p-parking lot. They come back with some friends around closing and b-beat the bejesus out of him with two-b’fours. Left him in the dumpster.”
    “Killed him?” the man wanted to know.
    “Damn near,” Tree said.
    “Their own fault for hiring nigger bouncers out there.”
    “B-bullshit,” Tree said. “It was Dick Krause’s kid.”
    “Benny?”
    “How do I know?” Tree said. There were limits to what a man could know, and he had reached his with regard to what had happened out at The Bachelors.
    “You’re thinking of Benny Raite,” somebody explained to the man who’d wanted to know if it was Benny.
    “They hire big coon kids from Amsterdam to be bouncers out there,” said the man Tree had tried to silence.
    Tree stared at him again. “This was Dick Krause’s kid, I’m telling you.”
    “Benny,” somebody said. “Benny Krause.”
    “Bullshit,” somebody else said. “I seen Benny Krause this morning.”
    “Benny Raite’s a bouncer,” said a third. “I bet you’re thinking of him.”
    They were still working on it when I got off at five-thirty. My father’s car was in front of the Mohawk Grill, so I stopped in. He didn’t look good. He was dirty from the road and his eyes were still red from the weekend. He was staring at two skinny grilled pork chops.
    “I meant to stop in,” he said apologetically. He usually did when he got home from work, before going home to clean up. “I was afraid I’d get started all over again.”
    “Good thinking,” I said.
    “Even I can’t be a dummy all the while,” he said.
    “Right,” Harry mumbled.
    “Want a pork chop?” my father said, ignoring Harry’s sarcasm.
    “Not really,” I said.
    “Want two pork chops?”
    We both grinned. He really did look sick.
    “Tonight I go home,” he said.
    “Mind if I use the car?”
    “Go ahead. Leave it someplace I can find it is all.”
    I said I would. When I got up to go, he said, “You want to come work on the road with me?”
    At that moment, Untemeyer ambled by, his day done, the pockets of his black alpaca suit bulging with slips, heading for home, a destination he kept strictly secret to keep from being badgered. “They need a new flagman, right?” he said.
    “Meyer,” my father said. “Somebody’s gonna follow you home one of these nights and his financial problems will all be over.”
    “Not if he chooses tonight,” the bookie grumbled. “Besides, I get mugged every day by the OTB. I should have gone into prostitution.”
    “Who’d want to fuck you, Meyer?” my father said.
    “Any number of women,” Untemeyer said. “I got that certain something.”
    “You too?” my father said.
    “I get it occasionally myself,” Harry said.
    “The good part is he grows the penicillin to cure it with right here on the premises,” Untemeyer said, letting the door swing shut behind him.
    “Actually,” I said, “I may head back out west come September. Besides, I couldn’t do that to Mike.”
    “You’d make a lot more on the road is all,” my father said. “Work until it gets cold like I do. Would they let you