The Risk Pool

Department and no way for me to settle my long-standing account, to make an honest man of myself. Further up the street, whoever inherited Mike’s Place apparently hadn’t felt sufficiently motivated to change the name of the establishment. New signs weren’t cheap, and when the old one had a decent reputation to trade on, you were better off leaving it where it was. It was one of the constants of Mohawk life that businesses were bought, sold, bartered, and won in poker games every day without significantlyaltering the establishments themselves. There wasn’t even any perceived need to print up an “Under New Management” sign to stick in the front window, because everybody already knew before you could put it there. The fact that you couldn’t get a decent plate of spaghetti at Mike’s anymore was common knowledge before the new owner had opened for business that first Monday morning. That he would attempt to appease the old crowd with Buffalo chicken wings was already the subject of conversation and conjecture at the Mohawk Grill.
    When I got to Third Avenue, I headed north up the gentle hill toward the house that had been my mother’s and mine until her breakdown. The fact that the neighborhood had deteriorated was presaged by the cracked, heaving sidewalks that lined both sides of the narrow street. Every other house sported a sagging porch, railings with missing spindles, chipped and yellowed paint, rusted mailboxes. Our old house was one of the worst, and when I saw it I felt a deep sense of personal failure. Whoever owned the little house now had begun to paint it pale green, then run out of paint, or money, or energy. And this had happened at least one summer before, by the looks of it. There was a monster Buick Skylark up on blocks in the drive, and broken children’s toys strewn throughout the yard. Something was missing, too, and it took me a moment to realize what it was.
    “Ice storm,” explained a woman who came out onto the back porch of the house next door when she saw me standing there outside her kitchen window, staring at the spot where my climbing tree had been. “Killed every tree on the block.”
    It was true. When my mother and I had lived there, the street had been lined with mature trees along the narrow terrace between sidewalk and road. Not one was left, though a few slender young trees had been replanted. For some reason, these didn’t look like they’d ever grow to be much taller than the wire mesh that encircled and protected them.
    “You can’t get decent people to live on a street that don’t have nice trees,” the woman said ruefully. “Where do you live?”
    “New York City,” I admitted reluctantly, then added, “I used to live right here.”
    “I lived here all my life,” the woman said. “In Mohawk, that is. This used to be my aunt’s house. Maybe you knew my aunt.”
    She told me her aunt’s name, and I said that of course I had.
    “I wouldn’t want to live anyplace else,” she said. “It gets worsehere every year, but so does everyplace, is the way I look at it. Harold and I tried to plant new trees, but they won’t take because of the roots. You got to dig up the old stumps and go way down. It cost a lot and the roots go everywhere. Under the streets and the lawns. We got them in our cellar. And you seen the sidewalks.”
    I said I had.
    “You’d like to plant a tree or two, but where?”
    “The roots will die eventually,” I said, trying to be optimistic, since she really wanted to plant trees.
    “That’s what I said. Harold says no. He says they just petrify there in the ground, make it impossible for anything alive to find a space and grab ahold. ’Course Harold is a sourpuss. I think sometimes he just says things like that so he won’t have to go out and try. Some people would rather do without trees than dig a little hole.”
    I had written my father’s new address on a note card and put it in my wallet. When I got there, I took the note card out to double-check, then set my bag down on the sidewalk and laughed out loud. “McKinley Luxury Apartments” the new sign said. Above the arched entrance, graven in stone, you could still see the old one: “McKinley School.” My father, it occurred to me now, had been just about my present age when he sat out front of the school in his white convertible, waiting for my young first grade teacher to bring me out, so I could explain why I was telling everybody he was dead.
    There was