The Risk Pool

’em. I could probably fix them if I could see, but to fix them I have to take them off, and then I can’t see anymore. They’re just for night driving anyhow. Even the risk pool wouldn’t insure me if I didn’t get them.”
    “Don’t they usually give you a spare set?”
    “Yup. I lost those two days after I sat on these. If I could just lose this pair, I’d go back and order some more. But every time I walk off some asshole yells at me to take my glasses with me. You son of a bitch, I tell him. You couldn’t yell at me when I walked off and left my
good
pair. Every time I try to lose these bastards you notice.”
    By this time we were outside the terminal on the ramp across from the short-term parking, which was only a quarter full. I started looking for a car that might be my father’s.
    “Where you going?” my father wanted to know. He’d stopped by a pale yellow Subaru compact parked squarely in the middle of a loading zone. He slipped a key into its trunk and turned. There was a reassuring thunk, but when he lifted up, the trunk stayed shut. “Bitch,” he said. “It does this sometimes in wet weather.”
    I looked around. “It rained here today?”
    He went around to the driver’s side and slung my bag in the backseat, already piled high with miscellaneous junk. He shook his head no. “Why, did it rain in the city?”
    I grinned at him across the Subaru’s hood. “It’s good to be home.”
    “Get in then,” he said. “We aren’t home yet, in case you didn’t notice.”
    He was right, too.
    Between the airport and the Thruway entrance he told me all about the Subaru, which somebody’d talked him into buying. That little shit? he wanted to know, but then he figured what the hell. We’d taught the Japs a thing or two. Maybe they’d learned how to make cars. People said they did, and the guy who’d owned it didn’t want an arm and a leg, so …
    What troubled me, but apparently not my father, was the way people kept honking and swerving around us. My father honked back, waved, and continued talking. People honked hellos at him all the time in Mohawk, where they knew him, and he saw no reason why they shouldn’t in Albany, where they didn’t.
    “Do you have your lights on?” I said finally, noticing that the dash wasn’t lit up.
    He looked down over the rims of his glasses and had to let go of the wheel to catch them when they fell off. “Should be,” he said.
    The Thruway entrance was a hundred yards away. We pulled in. When the attendant at the gatehouse handed us our ticket, he said, “Your lights, Mac.”
    “Right,” my father said, and he put the Subaru in gear. “Not this shit again,” he said, flicking the light switch in and out. I tried the radio, windshield wipers, cigarette lighter. Nothing. My father tried the turn signals. Nothing. We merged onto the Thruway, regardless, a big sedan careening around us at the last second. I put on my seatbelt.
    “I’ll show you a little trick,” my father said when a double-hitch Peterbilt roared by and tugged at us. Slipping into its wake, my father goosed the Subaru, which strained dutifully until be got right on the Peterbilt’s big, well-lit ass end.
    My father, pleased with himself, looked over at me from abovethe black rims of his cockeyed glasses. “You worry too much,” he said. “You always did.”
    I checked the speedometer, which was vibrating between sixty-five and seventy. Mohawk was forty black miles away. I wondered if, when we hit the Peterbilt, I’d be able to get down quickly enough to avoid decapitation.
    “I’ve always wanted a Subaru,” I said, trying to sound more full of admiration than terror. “But there’s not much point in owning a car in the city.”
    “I can’t live without one,” my father said, punching in the cigarette lighter, having already forgotten. After a few seconds he began to lean slightly toward the lighter in anticipation of its clicking out. His Camel dangled from his lips as he divided his attention between the big truck only a few feet in front of us and the recalcitrant lighter. Finally it dawned on him. “Argh!” he said, pulling the cold lighter out, examining it, putting it to his stubbled cheek to make sure. Then he tossed it out the window and turned to me. “So,” he said. “Tell me about this editor shit.”
    “Editor
ship
,” I corrected, and pointed at the Peterbilt. “Are those brake lights?”
    I had only one other contact with Mohawk in the