The Risk Pool

decision to come to Mohawk even before meeting my father in the gray half-light of late afternoon. F. William Peterson was a soft man of some bulk, well dressed in a knee-length overcoat with a fur collar, when he finally appeared in the deserted parking lot at quarter to five. Never an athletic man, he was engaged in pulling on a fine new pair of gloves, a Christmas giftfrom Mrs. Peterson, while trying at the same time not to lose his footing on the ice. My father never wore gloves and was not wearing any that day. For warmth, he blew into his cupped hands, steam escaping from between his fingers, as he came toward F. William Peterson, who, intent on his footing and his new gloves, hadn’t what a fair-minded man would call much of a chance. Finding himself suddenly seated on the ice, warm blood salty on his lower lip, the attorney’s first conclusion must have been that somehow, despite his care, he had managed to lose his balance. Just as surprisingly, there was somebody standing over him who seemed to be making rather a point of not offering him a hand up. It wasn’t even a hand that dangled in F. William’s peripheral vision, but a fist. A clenched fist. And it struck the lawyer in the face a second time before he could account for its being there.
    F. William Peterson was not a fighting man. Indeed, he had not been in the war, and had never offered physical violence to any human. He loathed physical violence in general, and this physical violence in particular. Every time he looked up to see where the fist was, it struck him again in the face, and after this happened several times, he considered it might be better to stop looking up. The snow and ice were pink beneath him, and so were his new gloves. He thought about what his wife, an Italian woman five years his senior and recently grown very large and fierce, would say when she saw them and concluded right then and there, as if it were his most pressing problem, that he would purchase an identical pair on the way home. Had he been able to see his own face, he’d have known that the gloves were not his most pressing problem.
    “You do
not
represent Jenny Hall,” said the man standing in the big work boots with the metal eyelets and leather laces.
    He
did
represent my mother though, and if my father thought that beating F. William Peterson up and leaving him in a snowbank would be the end of the matter he had an imperfect understanding of F. William Peterson and, perhaps, the greater part of the legal profession. My father was arrested half an hour later at the Mohawk Grill in the middle of a hamburg steak. F. William Peterson identified the work boots with the metal eyelets and leather laces, and my father’s right hand was showing the swollen effects of battering F. William Peterson’s skull. None of which was the sort of identification that was sure to hold up in court, and the lawyer knew it, but getting my father tossed in jail, howeverbriefly, seemed like a good idea. When he was released, pending trial, my father was informed that a peace bond had been sworn against him and that if he, Sam Hall, was discovered in the immediate proximity of F. William Peterson, he would be fined five hundred dollars and incarcerated. The cop who told him all this was one of my father’s buddies and was very apologetic when my father wanted to know what the hell kind of free country he’d spent thirty-five months fighting for would allow such a law. It stank, the cop admitted, but if my father wanted F. William Peterson thrashed again, he’d have to get somebody else to do it. That was no major impediment, of course, but my father couldn’t be talked out of the premise that in a truly free country, he’d be allowed to do it himself.
    So, instead of going to see F. William Peterson, he went to see my mother.
She
hadn’t sworn out any peace bond against him that he knew of. Probably she couldn’t, being his wife. It might not be perfect, but it was at least some kind of free country they were living in. Here again, however, F. William Peterson was a step ahead of him, having called my mother from his room at the old Nathan Littler Hospital, so she’d be on the lookout. When my father pulled up in front of the house, she called the cops without waiting for pleasantries, of which there turned out to be none anyway. They shouted at each other through the front door she wouldn’t unlock.
    My mother started right out with the main point. “I don’t love you!”