The Risk Pool

already. I signed the title back over to my father, stuffed it in the glove box, and locked the car. A southbound Trailways bus was parked a block and a half down the street and I got on. That night I called Mike’s Place from New York and left a message.
    It was almost three months later, a couple days after Thanksgiving, when the telephone rang and I recognized my father’s voice.
    “Well?” he said.
    “Well hello,” I said.
    “How come you’re never home when I call?”
    I told him I was working every minute to pay for the dark,dreadful apartment I’d rented and the few sticks of ratty furniture I had to keep me company.
    “You’re all straightened around though?”
    I said I was all straightened around.
    “Want to run up for a day or two?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Christmas is coming …”
    “Have to be tomorrow to do any good,” he said. Then he explained why. “Eileen will understand if you can’t.”
    Drew Littler’s funeral was going to be in the afternoon. They’d been trying to reach me and my father had gone over to my mother’s, hoping she’d know my number. “How the hell did I know she’s gone to San Diego of all fucking places?” he said. And for the next ten minutes he regaled me with the difficulties he’d had tracking me down through F. William Peterson’s old law firm, how they wouldn’t give him the California number, how he’d had to have Wussy find out, how somebody ought to have his ass kicked for keeping secrets, how my mother hadn’t wanted to give him my number, how F. William Peterson had had to call back and leave it at Mike’s Place. “He knew he better had,” my father said, his voice rich with the memory of having shown F. William Peterson, on numerous occasions, where the bear shit in the buckwheat. “I never heard of this Balboa Island, but I bet I could find it, and I got just about enough money to get there, too.”
    A dreamy distant feeling had come over me as I listened to him talk, thoroughly sidetracked, imagining, as had always been his habit, that other people’s stories were his own, that you couldn’t understand their complete meaning unless they got filtered through his point of view. Eventually, he got back to Drew Littler. He’d been going so fast that when he hit the side of the Chevy van the impact had knocked the vehicle clear off the highway and onto its side in the ditch. Drew himself had ruptured the van’s side paneling and ended up inside. “Most of him, anyhow,” my father said. The driver of the van had had a green light and never saw the Harley enter the intersection. Eyewitnesses guessed Drew Littler had to be going a hundred. They said the Harley neither slowed nor swerved before impact.
    “So,” my father said. “You still there.”
    “I’m here,” I said.
    “Where’s your apartment?”
    I told him.
    “I had one a couple blocks from there,” he said.
    “When?”
    “A long time ago. Right after I left your mother. And you.”
    We left it that I’d try to get home around Christmas. “Send Eileen a card if you can find one,” he said.
    I said I would.
    “She’s a good girl,” he reminded me. “Now she’s got one less headache.”
    “Jesus, Dad,” I said.
    “Well?”
    “It’s an awful thing to say.”
    “Not really,” he said. “Be honest.”
    “It really is. Honestly.”
    “If you say so,” he said. “Anyway, remember. The streets go one way, the avenues the other.”
    “Thanks,” I said. Words to live by.
    “Is Balboa Island really an island?”
    “I don’t know,” I told him. “She says the sun shines every day.”
    “Good,” he said. “Good for her.”



41
    During the next decade I saw my father no more than a dozen times, this despite the fact that the buses ran from the Port Authority in Manhattan right to the cigar store on the Four Corners in downtown Mohawk in just under five hours. Twice during this period he called me from the Bronx with tickets to Yankee ball games that had come to him via a route so circuitous that it took him the first couple innings to explain. There was this guy who got them at work and who gave them to a guy who couldn’t go, who gave them to his cousin, who discovered that morning that his car wouldn’t start and who gave them to a guy my father hadn’t seen since Christ was a corporal and who he just happened to run into outside the OTB. Over the years, my father had become increasingly fascinated with the workings of chance, and was every