The Risk Pool

into was Wussy, who was wearinga sport coat for only the second time in our long association. “Sam’s Kid,” he said. “I thought you’d got lost.”
    I grinned at him. I was Sam’s Kid again. Demoted after an incredibly brief tenure as my own person. “Have you ever done anything you said you were going to?” I asked him.
    “Yup,” he said. “I warned your old man I was going to outlive him, for instance. Of course I’m taking your word for the fact that he’s dead. I never saw no evidence.”
    “Neither did I, now that you mention it,” I told him.
    “Be just like him to turn up,” Wussy said.
    “Everybody else did,” I said, looking around. Both the lounge and the big dining room were packed and noisy, like the evening so many years ago when I’d thought my mother was dead, was so positive, in fact, that it had taken my father and Eileen and F. William Peterson to convince me I was wrong. That recollection, together with Wussy’s remark that it would be just like Sam Hall to turn up, engendered an almost overpowering sense that if I turned around quickly I’d see him grinning at me from across the room. And not the Sam Hall from the hospital, reduced almost to nothing by the cancer, but rather the old Sam Hall, in perfect health, who’d sparred with Jack Ward and Mike, and who’d offered on half a dozen occasions to put F. William Peterson on the seat of his pants and occasionally proved that this was no idle threat. Wussy was right; it wasn’t like my father to miss this kind of an opportunity for sport, and it took me a moment to shake off my father’s almost material presence.
    Across the room Mike was passing beer glasses beneath two open taps, then placing them on the bar. I didn’t see any money changing hands, nor was the cash register ringing. “Mike’s doing an open bar?” I said.
    Wussy nodded. “So far. He better stop pretty soon. Roy Heinz just came in, and he can drink a keg all by himself.”
    “I don’t see Eileen.”
    “She’ll be here,” Wussy said. “You wait.”
    I was watching Roy Heinz, who appeared to be searching for something. I couldn’t imagine what, given that he’d just arrived. After he’d gone into the dining room, peeked into the kitchen, and checked behind the bar, he came over to where Wussy and I were standing. “Where the hell’s Sammy?”
    “He died, Roy,” Wussy said. “Didn’t you hear?”
    “But where
is
he?” Roy insisted, looking first at Wussy, then at me.
    “No one knows,” Wussy said.
    Roy Heinz accepted this. “Open bar?” he said.
    We told him it was.
    “Nice gesture,” he said, shaking my hand, apparently having arrived at the erroneous conclusion that I was footing the bill. “Sammy would’ve liked that. Sammy would always buy a drink.”
    “You gonna live around here now?” he added hopefully, as if he suspected I might have inherited from my father some liberal, beer-buying gene.
    I went over to say hello to Mike as soon as there was an opportunity. “You invite all these people?” I said.
    “Twenty or so. The others invited theirselves.”
    “You’ve got the whole county here,” I said. For the most part, these were not people who normally frequented The Elms. They’d all come to have a look at the place, as they had for Jack Ward’s wake at the white jewel house. “I hope you’ll let me help out.”
    Mike waved my offer away good-naturedly. “Sammy and I go way back. This town might as well give up, now.” He looked and sounded genuinely pessimistic on the community’s behalf.
    “We can give him a send-off, anyway,” he added.
    As people began to come over and introduce themselves to me, I kept thinking about Mike’s remark—that Mohawk might as well give up, now that Sam Hall was gone. Given my father’s comprehensive lack of garden variety civic obligation, it was a pretty funny observation. But I knew what he meant just the same, and as I looked around the packed restaurant and greeted strangers who wanted to say they’d miss Sam Hall, I was suddenly scared. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it without him. Here I was, thirty-five years old, having lived more or less independently since leaving Mohawk for the university, a child of my own knocking for admittance at birth’s door. I had become, since the two years I’d lived with my father, if not a model of success, at least a model of self-reliance. And yet, right then, as I stood among my father’s friends and acquaintances