The Risk Pool

awakened in the middle of a nightmare.
    “You’re the only one?” he said nervously the first morning I served the seven for him.
    I said I was.
    “Aren’t you a little young to be going solo?” he said, as if he hadn’t counted on himself to be there with me. I was by then a seasoned one-year veteran, and had to resist the temptation to remark that he too looked a little young for a solo flight.
    Before leaving the shadowy sacristy for the bright altar, he always said, “I guess we’re all set then?” as if he couldn’t be sure without getting my educated opinion on the matter. I doubt mass would have been said that day had I professed uncertainty. But I never did, and so he took a deep breath and put his hand on my shoulder, the way a blind man grabs hold of someone he trusts not to lead him over any open manholes. He was complimentary of my bell ringing, my handling of the water and wine cruets, my lighting of the candles. “When Ned Hall lights a candle,” he often remarked, “it stays lit.” That might have been said for any candle lit by an altar boy, but it made me feel good anyway. After each successful mass, when the sacristy door closed behind us, Father Michaels acted like it was all my doing. “Ned, you’re a wonder. You’ll be pope someday.”
    After we got comfortable with each other, he wanted to know about my father. The old Monsignor had probably told him a little, because the new priest already knew Sam Hall wasn’t around. It had been over three years since he left Mohawk, I assumed, for good. I never talked about my father with anybody, including my mother, and at first I felt awkward, but I soon learned that talking about him didn’t make me feel the way I had thought it would. After mass, Father Michaels and I often sat on the sacristy steps in the sun, and there I told him how I had lied about my father being dead, and about his nocturnal marauding, and about the fishing trip with him and Wussy, and how thatended with my mother shooting the convertible. He laughed at the part about the fishhook in my father’s thumb, and I did too, though it had never seemed funny before. When I got to the shooting part, he went pale and wanted to know if I was exaggerating, as if it made him uncomfortable to think that one of his parishioners owned a gun, much less shot one. He had trouble associating the mother of my story with the quiet, pretty woman he’d seen in church who sometimes waited for me when mass was over.
    Perhaps to make me feel better, he told me about his own father who had been a drunk and beaten him and his mother until his unexpected and highly unusual death. When he spoke about the man, his eyes became unfocused and distant. Apparently, when Father Michaels had been a year or two older than I, his father had had a vision which reformed him on the spot. At the time he had been on a bender for nearly two weeks, during which he had not been home, much to the relief of the boy and his mother, whose eyes he had blackened before leaving and which were still greenish yellow. When he finally returned one afternoon, his wife was prepared to leap from the third-story window if necessary, but though shaky, her husband was sober and dressed, unaccountably, in a new suit. He was shaved and combed, and he announced that he had returned to them a new man. He certainly looked like one. The boy and his mother scarcely recognized him. The bag of groceries he was carrying was welcome though, as was the news that he had a job, a good one. He then kissed his wife’s yellow eyes and asked his son if he would like to go to a ball game at the Polo Grounds while his mother prepared dinner. At the ballpark they drank sodas and watched the game from high in the stands, and Father Michaels remembered it as the happiest day of his young life.
    When the game was over, the older man took his son’s hand and together they came down out of the stands. Father Michaels remembered the bright sun seemed to rest right on top of the opposite bleachers, and perhaps for that reason, his father thought they had reached the bottom when there was still one step to go. As a drunk, he had miraculously survived his share of dangerous falls. More than once he had missed the top step on the stairs outside their third-floor flat, unaware that he had done so until he discovered himself seated on the landing below. He had fallen off chairs, out of moving cars into gutters, off porches, offbicycles, off ice skates,