The Risk Pool

mother had called it kidnapping and said whether I knew it or not I had been in grave danger the whole time, as my condition upon return—beat up, cut up, swollen, diseased—made abundantly clear. I had been reduced to such a sorry state in a mere twenty-four hours, she reminded me, adding that “People who hang around your father often require hospitalization.” She considered F. William Peterson a prime example, though it seemed to me that his hospital visit had more to do with teaming up with her than with my father.
    It was hard to find fault with her basic thesis, though. Sam Hall, as one of his friends remarked to me many years later, should have been issued with a warning label. My mother hated Skinny for having raised his specter. “Why do you employ that horrid man?” she asked Father Michaels the next evening when he brought me home from the rectory. Often the priest lingered a few minutes on the front porch before heading back to the dark rectory dining room and one of Mrs. Ambrosino’s heavy, complicated dinners.
    “
I
don’t,” my friend explained, “though I don’t see any great harm in the man.”
    “
You
don’t see any great harm in anybody,” my mother replied petulantly. “You’d probably find much to admire in my husband.”
    “Now Jenny …” he said, and for a moment I thought he was going to reach out and take her hand.
    There may have been no great harm in Skinny, but the very next week I nearly got him fired. I was cutting the wide strip of grass between the church and rectory when the mower picked up a stone the size of a Ping-Pong ball. How it happened onto the sacred stretch of ground beyond the chain-link fence, I couldn’tguess, but there it was, and I saw it just as it disappeared beneath the mower. Instead of stopping—and I’m not sure I could have—I gritted my teeth and listened for a bang. I had picked up pebbles before and the clatter they made dancing around among the rotating blades was horrible. This time, however, there was just one modest thunk, then the normal sound of the mower. About two seconds later, however, there was the sound of shattering glass.
    At first, I did not connect the stone that disappeared beneath the mower with the hole in the stained-glass window on the second floor of the rectory. After all, the building was nearly fifty yards away, farther than I could have thrown a stone that size. I pulled the mower backward, examining the just-mowed area, hoping to discover the stone there on the ground, which would render the broken glass coincidental. No stone.
    The Monsignor had it in his hand when he came out. It had violated his bedroom, and the old priest was in no mood to marvel at the accuracy and difficulty of the shot, to me the single most impressive fact of the occurrence. Under different circumstances such long odds might have appeared miraculous, evidence of something other than natural law at work in the universe, for the round stone had plinked a neat hole in the red geometric center of the small window, a feat that a hundred stone-throwing sharpshooters couldn’t have duplicated given a hundred tries each. Unfortunately, this miraculous aspect of the event was lost on the Monsignor, whose horizontal matins the stone had interrupted. He was in his stocking feet, a fact I couldn’t get over.
    “Where is Mr. Donovan?” he wanted to know.
    That was a troublesome question. I didn’t doubt but that Skinny was asleep in the shade around the other side of the church. He had disappeared around the corner an hour earlier and one recent sweep of the mower had taken me close enough to see his work shoes, forming a V, pointed heavenward, jutting out from behind a bush. So I looked around, as if I expected to see the groundskeeper at my elbow and was surprised to discover him missing. “He was just here,” I said.
    The old priest squelched the still rattling motor, and the resulting silence was accusatory, like that of the confessional.
    “Kindly locate Mr. Donovan and ask him if I might have a moment of his time.”
    With that, he turned in his stocking feet and padded back to the rectory still clutching the stone.
    I found Skinny right where I had seen his shoes and he was in them, rubbing his eyes, awakened when the mower was turned off. “What’s going on?” he said suspiciously. He knew, of course, that the day would come when I would be discovered and he would have to explain why a boy was doing his work. He was prepared