The Risk Pool

orange balls showed up good from above, that the pilots of small planes could see them and stay clear of the power lines they were attached to. Out by the Albany airport he reminded us, there were orange balls everywhere. He had to admit he couldn’t say exactly what these particular orange balls were doing way the fuck out in the middle of the woods, the tops of the trees extending thirty feet above the cables and the nearestairport thirty miles away, but he knew they didn’t have a good goddamn thing to do with squirrels. Many years later I heard what I believe to be the explanation, though I may be mistaken—that in remote places where the winters were long and wet and cold, where ice would accumulate on the lines and make them heavy, the orange balls were used to keep the lines from crashing into one another and rupturing in the wind. But that day I had no explanation at all, and when the two of them wanted to know what the fuck I thought was so funny, I couldn’t explain.
    We ate at a bar halfway between Saratoga and Mohawk, getting back to town around dusk. Wussy insisted my father drop him off at the trailer. When my father intimated that going home for the night so early was unnatural and perverse, he admitted that he’d been with a woman that morning when we blasted the horn. Since she hadn’t had any way to get back to town, he assumed she was still there.
    “She’ll be madder than a wet hen,” my father said. “Where’d you tell her you were going?”
    “Out for cigarettes,” he admitted. “You got a spare pack by any chance?”
    When we pulled in, his pickup was gone.
    “Looks like she got tired of waiting,” my father said.
    “Must’ve hot-wired it,” Wussy said, his voice full of admiration. “I got the keys right here.”
    I got out, pulled the front seat forward so he could too.
    “Take it easy, Sam’s Kid,” he said. “Drop back by some day.”
    I said I would. I thought we were going to shake, but we didn’t. When he turned toward the trailer, I asked him if it was the same one he’d had so many years ago when we’d gone fishing.
    “Nope,” he said. “This here’s a new one. Dead ringer though, ain’t it?”
    At Greenie’s, my father and I drank a slow beer. It was Sunday night and slow and there was no reason to get involved, to buy a round or get one bought. We were there only because we didn’t want to go home and face the silent evening. So we shot the shit with Woody the bartender until a couple other guys came in and he went down to the other end of the bar to talk to them. Then Roy Heinz came in and asked my father if he could take twenty. When my father said he didn’t have it, Roy looked like he wouldcry. Then he saw me and remembered we’d been introduced. My father told him not even to consider it, that I was leaving Mohawk in the morning and that there would be no way to pay me back.
    “I could just mail it to him, Sammy,” Roy Heinz said. “What’s a stamp cost? Hell, I could do it. You know Roy Heinz is good for it.”
    “I
do
know you, Roy,” my father said. “And we both know you aren’t good for it.”
    Surprisingly, Roy Heinz did not take this as an insult. “You’re lucky, Sammy,” he said. “You got your boy here. I lost mine—”
    “I know that, Roy,” my father interrupted. “But I don’t want to hear about it this once, if it’s all the same to you. We aren’t going to even get started with that shit tonight. I’ll spring for one beer if you’ll take it someplace else and drink it.”
    Roy Heinz looked at him, then at me again. “Your old man, he’s the nuts. I just wisht I’d been the right kind of father to my boy—”
    “What’d I just say, Roy,” my father said.
    Roy’s eyes had gone liquid. “Hell, Sammy, I just—”
    “What’d I say?”
    “Sammy. I’m gone.”
    He wasn’t though, for another minute. First he had to look at us both lovingly and make sure we had a chance to reconsider and give him the twenty. Then he wanted to shake. But finally he couldn’t take the way my father was glaring at him and he turned on his heel.
    “What a fuckin’ pain in the ass,” my father said when he was finally out of earshot. “I get like that you have permission to shoot me.”
    I said Roy Heinz was a pretty sad case all right.
    “Pathetic is more like it. Most of the time I can take it, but the son of a bitch hasn’t got any other speed. You can only milk a dead kid so long.”
    When I laughed out loud, he