The Risk Pool

said what.
    “It’s just a funny image,” I said.
    My father got Woody’s attention and bought Roy Heinz a beer. Then he handed me his car keys. “I want you to take it when you go in the morning.”
    “What,” I said. “How will you get back and forth to work?”
    “Walk. Mike’s is just up the street. He’ll pay me under the table and maybe I’ll be okay if I can stay on the side of the bar where there aren’t any stools. Try, anyway.”
    I said it sounded like a good idea. If things didn’t work out, hecould always go back on the road come spring. I didn’t want the convertible, but taking it would probably be doing him a favor. It would certainly be a good deed to other motorists.
    “Can’t go on like this,” my father said, examining his bad hand, the black stub of his shortened thumb. “The next dumb son of a bitch that drops a pipe might drop it on my cojones, and then where would I be.”
    “Right where you are now.”
    He grinned at me. “Grown up to be a regular smart-ass, haven’t you.”
    When I took a swig of beer, he cuffed me hard on the back of the head, the way he always did when I was a kid. This time I rattled my teeth on the bottleneck and soaked the front of my shirt.
    “I can still kick your ass, you know. Old and tired as I am.”
    We played Liars on the bar for a while, got nowhere. Finally, he said to hell with it, it must be Dummy Day, and we walked back to the apartment. He’d borrowed a folding cot from somebody, and we went right to bed. My watch said ten o’clock.
    By ten-thirty he was snoring loudly and I was wide awake. The street below was noisy. Several times drivers honked and stopped, their conversations rising up from the street like mist and in our open window. I kept thinking about Roy Heinz and my father’s remark about how you could only milk a dead kid so long, grinning to myself in his dark flat, his peculiar smell permeating everything, even the borrowed cot. Then I thought about Willie Heinz and how useless he’d been standing watch when I dove in the country club pond for golf balls, and how when we all fled from the victims of our senseless vandalism, he’d been incapable of running more than two blocks or so without doubling back toward home. He had to be dead, I thought, or he’d have doubled back by now. And I thought about Drew Littler and how he’d reacted to my mentioning our old friend.
    I must have fallen asleep thinking about him, because when I awoke it was first light and the street below was quiet and I knew something I hadn’t known before. And I realized I had one last stop to make before leaving.
    The screen door was just slamming shut behind him when I pulled my father’s convertible up into the drive behind the big Harley. Eileen’s car was gone, for which I was grateful. When Iturned off the convertible’s ignition, hot blue smoke belched from the tailpipe, then floated in a lazy cloud up the drive. Drew Littler waved the air with one big hand.
    “What an ugly piece of shit that car is,” he said. “Your old man always owns piece-of-shit rust buckets.”
    “This one’s mine,” I said, not getting out. “He just gave it to me.”
    He chuckled without the slightest trace of good humor. “Must’ve got tired waiting for somebody dumb enough to steal it.”
    I shrugged.
    “I heard you’d left.”
    “Now, actually,” I said. “I just came over to say goodbye.”
    “She’s over at work.”
    “To you. You had any luck looking for work?”
    “I’m not looking for work.”
    “You ever check out that job at The Bachelors?”
    “I’m not looking for work.”
    “All right,” I said. “Forget it. I’ll see you around sometime.”
    “It must be true then,” he said. He was fiddling with the convertible’s door lock, up and down. “She told me they were broke, but I didn’t believe it.”
    I took a deep breath and almost got out of the car. It would have been suicide, of course. Besides, I didn’t really want to fight Drew Littler, wouldn’t have wanted to even if I’d had a chance of winning. In a way, I had him good, though he didn’t know it, and it occurred to me then, as I sat there bristling under the force of his insinuation, that perhaps that was why I’d driven out there. To finish Drew Littler off. There he stood, big as a house, smirking at me, imagining that his bulk counted for something, that he could by sheer size and strength and intimidation crash through life’s barriers. It was