The Risk Pool

drinking Mike’s free beer in Sam Hall’s honor, waves of panic as physically tangible as abdominal nausea crashed over me. It wasn’t that I needed Sam Hall for anything specific. I’d have been satisfied to know that his consciousness had somehow been saved, that his essence was beingkept alive in some jar on a shelf somewhere, that he continued to
be
. Of such fears, I thought as I drank off the rest of my beer in a gulp, are religions born.
    Also alcoholics. Before long, I began to feel the effects of both the beer and the forced joviality of the crowd. Everybody had a Sam Hall story to tell me. I was even introduced to the fabled Angelo, the cop whose favorite pastime had been lying in wait for my father outside bars so he could ticket him for drunk driving before he had a chance to get out of first gear. “Your old man was aces,” he told me from beneath heavy, hooded eyes. Then he repeated the story my father had told me the night I returned to Mohawk, about how he’d fled down a dark side street, pulled the convertible over to the curb, slid into the passenger seat, and then tried to convince Angelo that Untemeyer had been driving. I gathered that I was supposed to laugh, though Angelo didn’t, and something about his manner suggested that he’d be watching
me
now that Sam Hall was gone.
    My father’s favorite cop, little Andy Winkler, who’d been a paragon of sympathy and understanding the morning he’d discovered us breaking into the Night Owl to retrieve my duffel bag, was there also, though he informed me sadly that he wasn’t a policeman anymore. A year or two earlier he’d pulled a trucker over and tried to write him a ticket for doing eighty in a forty-five-mile zone. When the trucker couldn’t talk Andy out of it, he’d beaten the tiny policeman senseless and drove off leaving Andy in a ditch. It was not this that discouraged him, however, nor was it the months he spent in the hospital recuperating. What finally sent him in search of another line of work was fate. His first week back in uniform, a trucker who bore an unfortunate resemblance to the one who had pummeled him was blowing down the highway on the outskirts of town past Andy Winkler’s police car, which was parked, as always, behind a billboard. Andy gave chase and pulled the semi over. When the trucker got out and saw Andy Winkler, he made the mistake of grinning, probably at Andy’s size, though Andy concluded, and not without justification, that the trucker was smiling at the prospect of beating him up. Then he remembered the advice my father had given him so long ago, and he took his revolver out and shot the trucker in the thigh to prevent history repeating itself. But as luck would have it, several passersby saw the unprovoked attack and so Andy was now finishing up his associate’s degree in refrigerator repair at the communitycollege in Glens Falls. He hadn’t been beaten up once since matriculating and he’d discovered an aptitude for ferreting out what was wrong with refrigerators. Plus, he fit in behind them better than anybody in his class. “You miss the excitement though,” he confided to me. “Once you’ve been a cop …” he let the thought trail off.
    I discovered that talking to Andy Winkler had cheered me up considerably. His good-natured optimism dispelled some of the panic I’d been feeling, and when I spied Eileen Littler across the room, I was glad, though I had been dreading seeing her all day. I had not come to Mohawk for her son’s funeral, nor had I spoken to her since his death.
    I don’t know what I expected, but her appearance gave me a jolt. Always angular, she now looked caved in, somehow, as if she’d finally stopped fighting and agreed to pay some long-deferred judgment. She’d always possessed an admirable vitality, and I found myself wondering whether she’d lost it waiting around for my father, or by finally giving up on him. Or it may have died when her son did. I would never understand Eileen Littler well enough to know for sure, but seeing her now reminded me of her ancestor, the mythical Myrtle Littler, who lent her name to the park, and who died of heartbreak. When Eileen spotted me and came over, though, her hug still had plenty of resolve. Among other things she seemed resolved not to cry in front of her husband, who waited an obedient step behind her and who was not much bigger than Andy Winkler. He looked to be in his mid-fifties and sported a pretty amazing