The Risk Pool

you something else, too, since he won’t. He loves you.”
    “You too,” I said.
    “Not enough,” she said, shoving her hands in the back pockets of her cords. “I almost had him once. For a while there he’d get off work, come over, eat some dinner, play gin for fun. Sometimes just us. Sometimes Wussy. He got so he could walk by the pool hall and Untemeyer and the gin mills and all of it. Sometimes he’d mention you, and I’d say call, and he’d say what for, he’s doing fine.”
    “He’ll be back,” I said.
    She nodded the way people do to indicate that they’ve heardyou, without necessarily buying into your point of view. “You think so.”
    “Yup,” I said.
    “Well … lucky me.”
    On his back beneath the new bike, Drew Littler reminded me of the boy he’d been back when I spotted for him in the garage. Much of the former muscle had gone soft now, but when he lay on his back he flattened out and his blondish hair hung straight back, just as it had when we were boys. I wondered if it was strictly necessary for him to lie on his back that way. After all, it wasn’t a car he was underneath. “A one-owner,” he said, looking up at the big Harley critically, then at me, my shadow having fallen across him.
    “Who only used it to go back and forth to church,” I said.
    “That and haul his boat up to the lake,” he agreed. “Still do a hundred and twenty.”
    “Who’d want to go a hundred and twenty on a motorcycle?” It was a dumb question.
    “Let’s,” he said seriously. “Hop on.”
    He stood.
    When I said thanks anyway, he swung a big thigh over the saddle and the Harley roared to life so loud I took an involuntary step back. I had to wait for him to throttle down, and even then I had to shout.
    “I heard about a job.”
    He gunned the engine again, listened critically, then shut it down.
    “Out at The Bachelors,” I said, a little too loud, now that it was quiet again. I realized then that I had been wrong to come. The sound of my own voice was enough to convince me. “You know where that is?”
    “Tending bar?” he said.
    “Crowd control.”
    He grinned. “Bouncing. You think I’d be good at that.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I know I’d think twice before starting trouble.”
    “You be smart, no bigger than you are.” He stood straight and faced me with this observation, sucking in his gut. It pissed me off a little, but I was thinking twice.
    “I should mention they kicked the shit out of the last one and stuffed him in a dumpster.”
    “What’s the pay?”
    “How would I know?”
    “You know about the job.”
    “I just heard about the guy in the dumpster.”
    “And you thought of me.”
    “Right away,” I said.
    He nodded. “You sure you don’t want to go for a ride?”
    “Positive,” I told him, wondering if he was considering strapping me on against my will. To change the subject, I said, “Guess who I saw the other night.”
    He waited.
    “Roy Heinz,” I told him. “You remember Willie?”
    “What of it?” he said, his face a mask.
    “Nothing. I wondered if you ever heard from him is all.”
    “Why would I hear from Willie Heinz?”
    Somehow, it occurred to me, we were on the verge of hostilities again. His desire to provoke them seemed to have rhythmic peaks and troughs independent of the conversation itself. “No reason,” I said. “He looked up to you.”
    “Listen,” nodding vaguely in the general direction of the Ward house, miles away across the park and highway. “You can have it all, okay?”
    The weird part was that I understood him. No reference had ever been more oblique or sudden, but I had the feeling that this was what we’d been talking about all along, or what he imagined we’d been talking about.
    “Have what?” I said, trying to submerge the powerful feeling I’d had about him ever since the evening my father had beat him at arm wrestling and he’d threatened to break the arm he was suspended from. Drew Littler was insane.
    But his eyes went vague again and he offered me a big paw to shake. “Thanks for the tip on the job.”
    “Sure,” I said, accepting his offer, whatever it might mean. Then he kicked the Harley to life, did a circuit around the dirt yard, one booted foot dragging until the bike straightened and roared down the drive, narrowly missing my father’s convertible.
    Eileen’s white face was in the only window that looked out on the backyard and our eyes met across it as the Harley burned