The Risk Pool

Either that or she’d finally read what I’d done to her father’s book.
    The day before I planned to leave, I drove around the block that contained the post office until Claude came out. What I had in mind was a staged chance meeting and a quick goodbye. It was a crummy way to handle things, but I wasn’t up to another pizza in the steamy Schwartz flat. I thought I’d seen his wife Lisa once on the street, but I wasn’t sure, since half the hopeless pregnant girls in Mohawk looked just like her.
    When Claude finally lumbered down the marble steps at ten after five, I was just about to toot the horn when he looked up. I waved, thinking he’d seen me, but what had caught his attention was an old rusted-out Thunderbird that had passed just as I pulled over to the curb. Claude stood there on the steps, the stream of people leaving the building parting around him, like a rock in the middle of a stream. The T-Bird had stopped at the traffic light that dangled from a cable at the Four Corners intersection, and Claude watched until green released the line of cars. Only then was the spell broken.
    He walked right past my father’s convertible then, and I never did toot. In fact, I looked the other way, until it was safe to pull back into traffic. Out in the stream, I checked my rear view, but Claude had disappeared.
    “Your mother all bent out of shape?” my father wanted to know when I’d tossed my duffel bag into the trunk and we were headed out of town. She and I had said our goodbyes upstairs in the kitchen. When the convertible pulled into the drive, she decided against coming down.
    “No,” I told him, settling deep into the convertible’s front seat. “She thinks you’re taking me directly to the airport though, so don’t say anything if you see her.”
    “Why would
I
see her?” He crushed out what remained of his cigarette with what remained of his thumb, the stub crusted over and blackened just like the tip had been. He deposited the lifeless butt in the full ashtray. “I haven’t seen her three times in the last ten years. I’m gonna see her tomorrow, right?”
    It was true. They wouldn’t run into each other soon. And in afew months she and F. William Peterson would be gone from Mohawk for good. I’d promised both of them I wouldn’t say anything to my father, a promise I now considered breaking. He seemed in the midst of an uncharacteristically reasonable phase. There was no telling how much longer that would last, and it would have been nice to elicit from him a promise not to torment them, as he might decide to do if he found out from Wussy or somebody else that they were planning on slipping out of town. I decided to keep mum though. Benevolent intentions could backfire. Especially around Sam Hall, who didn’t always recognize them.
    “You got everything you need?” he said, looking over at me.
    “Probably not,” I admitted. “I’ve got everything I own though. Mike slipped me an extra two hundred bucks.”
    “Irma, you mean.”
    “Could be,” I admitted. It was Mike who’d put the money in my hand, but when I’d tried to say no, he’d nodded in the direction of the kitchen as if to suggest that his life wouldn’t be worth much if he returned with the money. The funny part was that Irma wasn’t even
in
the kitchen, having gone home early, out the back way, which meant I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye.
    “Count on it,” my father said. “They don’t come any tougher than Irma, but once she decides you’re all right …”
    I looked out the back and saw we were trailing blue smoke. The car smelled as if it were about to detonate.
    “We’ll put some oil in in a minute,” he said.
    What we’d planned was to catch the last afternoon of the Saratoga flat track and, depending on how that worked out, maybe the harness races in the evening. I’d get on a bus the next morning. I had about six hundred I’d saved from working at Mike’s, plus a certified check for a thousand from F. William Peterson, who didn’t mind calling it a loan if that would get me to take the money. He said my mother didn’t know anything about it, and I think he was telling the truth.
    “We get lucky at the track, I want you to take the money,” my father said. “I owe you, anyhow.”
    This I recognized as a reference to the money he’d borrowed over a dozen years ago, and I couldn’t help smiling. “Whatever you say,” I told him. We could fight about it later if we had to. I