The Risk Pool

banana daiquiris and piña coladas and all the other asshole drinks. He’d fallen only a few feet off the form truck, but his elbow had taken the full impact. The surgeons had done what they could, pieced the shattered elbow back together, said that in a month or two, with a little luck and some physical therapy, he’d get back ninety percent use of the arm. For therapy he’d worked the other side of the bar, bending his elbow like he was told.
    “It looks worse today than when you got out of the hospital,” Mike said.
    “I know it,” my father conceded. “What do you want from me. They say I can work.”
    “Fuck ’em. Come back and work for me. I’ll put Ned on too. Weekends you can work together.”
    “What good would I be? I can’t straighten my arm past here.” My father demonstrated.
    “Right. You can’t tend bar, but you can work construction,” Mike said, shaking his head. “Your old man’s got rocks upstairs.”
    “I just happen to be tough,” my father told him. “Some guys are. Other guys are pussies. I’m not naming any names.”
    I was still working on the fact that my father had had a serious accident and an operation to boot, and hadn’t called. “Thanks for telling me about all this,” I said when Mike was gone.
    “You’re welcome,” he said. “What would you have done? Come down here and held my hand while they operated?”
    “If I had to have an operation, wouldn’t you want to know?”
    “That’s different.” He grinned. “I’d explain it if I thought you were smart enough to understand.”
    He rolled his sleeve back down, with some difficulty, because the elbow was still sore and there was much more of it than the shirt was designed to accommodate.
    “We could try it … if you wanted to tend bar …”
    “I was planning on taking some classes in the city this fall,” I said.
    “Good,” he said. “Glad to hear it.”
    I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected the slightest shade of disappointment in his voice, perhaps the result of my answering so quickly, as if the idea of returning to Mohawk and working with him had merited no serious consideration. But if he was disappointed, he covered it quickly, spinning around on his bar stool to offer his other hand and elbow on the bar. “Anyhow, this is the one I arm-wrestle with.”
    It was also the one that was missing part of a thumb from the earlier accident. It occurred to me then that my father was losing a subtle war of attrition.
    My more recent visit to Mohawk was about three years after the one I just related. I’d flown in to Albany on the last commuter flight on Friday night. Our plan was to catch the Travers Stakes at Saratoga the next afternoon, spend the evening catching up (it had been nearly nine months since we’d spoken on the telephone, over a year since we’d seen each other), then I’d take the bus back to the city on Sunday.
    I figured on an hour or so of quiet reading time in the airport before he arrived. My father always either lost track of the clock and left Mohawk about the same time the plane was landing, or left in plenty of time but got off at the wrong Albany exit and then claimed they moved the airport again. But this evening, to my surprise, he was right there at the gate when I got off my plane, looking as if he had secret doubts about being in the right place.Also, he was wearing glasses. But even with them I spotted him long before he picked me out of the crowd.
    “Well,” he said, when we shook. “You
were
on there.”
    “I said I would be.”
    I couldn’t help staring at his glasses, which were missing one arm. The other dutifully hooked one ear, providing an imperfect anchor for the lenses, which balanced precariously on the bridge of his nose.
    “I’d about given up,” he said.
    “You expected me to be in first class?”
    “Why not? You’re getting to be such a big shot down there,” he said, taking the small bag I was carrying.
    “A little shot,” I assured him. When I’d called to say I was coming I’d told him about the junior editorship I’d just been promoted to. “Just slightly bigger than a year ago when I was no shot at all.”
    “Well, that’s all right,” he said. “My son, the book editor. What do you think of my cheaters? I bought them so I could see the racing form.”
    “Most people like the kind that hook behind
both
ears.”
    “I like them that way myself,” he admitted. “In fact, these were that way until I sat on