The Risk Pool

it or not.”
    “If you say so.”
    “Funny thing happened this morning,” he said seriously. “I’m over in the drugstore …” he nodded out the unshaded window and across the street. “I gotta get a couple a things. Some razor blades in case I want to shave again. A tube of toothpaste. Suddenlythere’s this girl in a wheelchair. I don’t know her. Never saw her before. Pretty little thing. Cute. Said she was seventeen, but I can’t believe that. I step out of the way to let her through, but she just sits there looking at me. You’d never guess what she said.”
    Actually, I had a pretty terrible guess, but I kept it to myself.
    “She says, ‘Mr. Hall, I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. I told my parents all along, but they wanted to sue. And the lawyer, he wanted to. We was all drinking and racing and none of this is your fault. I knew you’d be worrying about it, so I just wanted you to know.’ ”
    “Pretty nice,” I said.
    He nodded. “Looked about fifteen, not seventeen,” he said, as if the question of her age were important somehow. “Cute, too.”
    He sank back down into the dilapidated sofa, ran his hands through his hair. “And the funny part is that I don’t think I’d given her two thoughts until right then. That’s the funny part.”
    It was a terrible story, and I could tell it was giving him a terrible time. As it should have, probably. What I couldn’t figure out was the introductory moral he’d prefaced it with—that some people were born lucky. I thought about it all the way home and couldn’t decide whether I’d ever met anybody who was truly lucky. The person who came closest, the more I thought about it, was me.

40
    And so I prepared to leave Mohawk again.
    Mike took it hardest. It was tough to find a bartender who didn’t either steal or give it away. My mother, on the other hand, seemed almost grateful. The fiction of my anthropological research was wearing thin. She wanted to believe me, but sometime during the summer the nature of our relationship had changed,and I’d cut back on the number of lies I told her. In spite of ourselves we’d had an honest moment or two, and they’d managed to spoil our former innocence. Often I’d catch her looking at me strangely, with equal shares disappointment and sympathy. Like most parents, it had been her goal to spare me, and like most children, I’d been determined not to be spared. Life, in these matters, almost always sides with youth. And so my mother and I had for the first time in our lives arrived at a quiet understanding.
    The timing was just right, too. Because the evening I got off my last shift at Mike’s Place, I met F. William Peterson, who’d been out of town all week on mysterious personal business, on the back stairs that led down from my mother’s flat. He was consulting his watch as his heavy legs churned downward, and he reminded me of the rabbit in Alice. He didn’t notice me until we nearly collided on the landing.
    “Ned!” he said. “Wish me luck!”
    “Good luck, Will,” I said.
    “Thanks.” And then he was gone.
    Upstairs, my mother sat on the sofa, surrounded by brochures. “San Diego!” one said. “Port O’ The Sun!” proclaimed another. She was bent forward, staring at them, as if unsure she was permitted to touch. The glossy brochure that pictured Balboa Island was the one that occupied her direct attention. It was all blue sky and sea and orderly rows of small, well-kept cottages, their window sills decorated with bright plant boxes. F. William Peterson, it turned out, had just inherited one of them.
    I could see in my mother’s eyes that she considered this outrageous fortune another of life’s cruelties. As a young telephone operator she had dreamed of places where winter wasn’t capitalized. Phoenix, Arizona. Santa Fe, New Mexico. San Diego, California. Here was a wish from another lifetime, granted twenty-five years too late, as if God were in a place so distant that it took almost forever for wishes to travel there, like pale starlight from a distant galaxy, eons old and all worn out even as we look at it.
    I did not see Tria again. I called once to say goodbye, but her mother answered and said she wasn’t there in a tone of voice that reminded me of the one she’d used a decade earlier when, on JackWard’s advice, I’d called his lovely daughter from the Mohawk Grill. I didn’t blame the old woman. For all I knew, she was acting on Tria’s instructions.