The Risk Pool

what he’d imagined when we were boys and he’d pumped iron, the vein in his big forehead wriggling angrily. At some level, he still believed it, his experience of life notwithstanding. Believed it, though he’d been to jail, been behind iron bars that would not be budged.
    He must have guessed that he was wrong about things that first time he went to jail after battering the Negro boys outside the pool hall, must have seen the significance of finally getting out as a result of judicial discretion, not force of will. In his cell he’d have had plenty of time to think about the iron that neither bent normoved. He had little else to think about in that cell. In there he would not have heard of Jack Ward’s death and would not have known that it was a dead man’s car he and Willie Heinz were stealing the minute he got out of jail. He must have found that out only when he got back to town, and by then everything in the world had changed. He’d still been damp from the river when we’d found him braced up in the entryway to my father’s flat, raving and belligerent, the two deaths merging in what was left of his rationality. It must have taken Jack Ward’s Lincoln a while to sink, and depending on where he had driven it into the river, the car may have made it a fair distance out into the current. Even in the dark he must have seen its black silhouette drifting downstream toward Amsterdam. They had barrel-assed down to the water’s edge, no doubt, whooping all the way, and then something had gone wrong. Willie Heinz, who couldn’t swim, had remained in the drifting car, trapped, probably afraid to open the door. Or perhaps they’d been drinking all during that long afternoon joyride and Willie Heinz had passed out or been drunk enough to imagine he wouldn’t be afraid, until it was too late. I’d thought of a dozen or so variations on this basic scenario, and one of them had to be the truth.
    There was now very little of the young Drew Littler it had taken three men and a needle-wielding physician to subdue that night. And I couldn’t think of much to be gained from the truth. Maybe truth wasn’t a concept I’d ever been all that devoted to. For the sake of the human race, it wouldn’t be wise to execute all the liars.
    “Actually,” I told Drew Littler. “I dropped by to ask a favor.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. I’d like to ask you not to let my father pick a fight with you.”
    “Tell
him
.”
    “Nobody can tell him anything,” I smiled. “You know that.”
    “Then I’m not responsible, am I.”
    “Nope,” I said. “That’s why it’s a favor. Say it’s for an old friend.”
    He studied me then and what he said surprised me, though it probably shouldn’t have. “We was never friends,” Drew said. “I’d’ve known.”
    The simple truth of his statement shamed me. He was right. I had no business asking him for a favor. I had always blackly hatedhim, even worse than my father hated him, perhaps. He was almost as dumb as my father thought, and twice as dangerous, but he wasn’t the sort of man you could flatter into thinking you’d once been friends.
    On the other hand, he wouldn’t hold it against you that you hadn’t been, and a second after he’d said his piece, he held out a hand. “We could shake anyhow,” he said.
    I took the hand. We shook.
    “Don’t worry about Sammy,” he said.
    I waited, but that was all he had to say on the subject. “All right,” I said. “I won’t.”
    I turned the key in the ignition and the car’s exhaust spit very nearly solid matter. When I started to back down the drive, Drew Littler rapped on the hood. “You know what happened back then, don’t you,” he said.
    “Know what?” I said.
    I’d become a far better liar since that day twenty years ago when I’d told my first-grade classmates how come my father wasn’t around. Drew Littler couldn’t have told from my face. I’ve been over it and over it, and that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.
    I put in a quart of oil before leaving town, but my father’s convertible gave a dreadful shudder and died right on the county line about ten miles out of Mohawk. The good news was I was at the crest of a long gradual hill that wound all the way down to the river, so I put the car in neutral and let it coast the last mile right into a gas station at the foot of the hill. The convertible came to rest right next to a phone booth, but I didn’t use it. I’d delayed my getaway too long