The Risk Pool

and full of vinegar.”
    The last couple times I’d been to Mohawk, we’d ended up drinking and playing the horses with Smooth and company in Trip’s bar. Untemeyer was getting too old to make his usual rounds, so he set up shop permanently at Trip’s after his noon hour at the Mohawk Grill. Most of his action came from Smooth’s cronies and they set him up in a comfortable booth where hecould write out his slips and complain about his bad back, which he blamed on having been incarcerated and left to rot for nearly three hours in the Mohawk jail by Smooth’s inefficiency in getting him sprung.
    It took a while, but it finally dawned on me that my father’s association with this new younger crowd (Untemeyer excepted) signaled a significant change in him. From the time I was a boy, I had always been vaguely aware that there wasn’t much that happened in Mohawk that my father didn’t have a line on. If it was shady, he probably knew all about it, who was involved, what the risks were. As often as not, he’d been asked if he wanted in, or what he thought of the whole deal. Frequently he’d be drawn aside by somebody who slid into Harry’s with an air of wished-for invisibility and engaged my father in an urgent, voices-lowered conversation. My sense of things was that my father seldom engaged in anything more serious than filling up at a closed gas station, or driving a car with a full trunk from one place to another, or engaging the fat cop on the corner in a conversation to keep him where he was instead of ambling up the street where somebody would just as soon he not be for another twenty minutes. But he was thought to be savvy by Mohawk’s dumber petty criminals, and they consulted him the way one consults a stock broker. Often their conversations ended with my father saying, “Not if it was me, I wouldn’t.”
    But the days when not much got past him were gone, as I discovered with respect to Alan Taggart, who was one of the semiregulars in Trip’s and who was so obviously a dealer that I was astonished that my father hadn’t tumbled to the fact. Unless of course he had, and simply wasn’t sharing the knowledge with me. He’d always considered me a bit slow, permanently impaired by my mother’s ethics and my early days as an altar boy. But I don’t think this was the case, at least with regard to Alan Taggart, whose wealth my father had explained to me as having been inherited. The reason I’m so certain on this point is that one afternoon, after I’d walked in on a bathroom transaction, Smooth asked me not to mention it to my father. “He’s death on recreational narcotics,” Smooth explained conspiratorially, as if this were the one fault he could find with my father’s otherwise sterling character.
    What concerned me most about my father’s new friends, though they may have been, as he said, “all good guys,” according to the rather amorphous standards by which good guys are credentialed,was that I suspected that he was drawn to them not so much because they were mildly disreputable, which would have been in character, as because they were all successful. He had never buddied with lawyers, contractors, and real estate people before, and he seemed to be discovering, late in life, that he enjoyed the company of men whose manners and dress and wit would have made him feel awkward or even inadequate when he was younger. I remembered with some embarrassment the way he had behaved around Jack Ward, with whom he had served in the war, where social distinctions disappeared under the constant assault of threatened annihilation and the absolute need for competence. There was nothing like fear to make democracy real. But my father must have learned almost immediately after returning from Germany that the democracy he had fought to preserve was class-riddled. His attempts at jovial camaraderie with Jack Ward, as I now recalled them, had been closer to obsequious fawning.
    Nor was this all. I often suspected that another motive in cultivating these new friends was myself. My father introduced each new person who came into Trip’s according to his profession—pediatrician, insurance salesman, chiropractor (he held no grudge against the chiropractor who had failed to cure his lung cancer), dentist. His son was a professional and, therefore, must be provided with professional acquaintances during his visits. Five years earlier, such behavior would have been entirely out of character for my