The Risk Pool

reportedly used as lovers’ hideaways. I wasn’t allowed in the park at night though. In fact, my mother wasn’t keen on the idea of my being there anytime, but the big twenty-six-inch bicycle that mysteriously appeared on our porch liberated me. When I waved goodbye to my mother and promised not to go too far (how far was that?), she could only wave back and hope. Since Father Michaels had walked out the sacristy door and down the street nearly two years before, my mother had scarcely left the house. Rumor had it he had been gathered up and sent somewhere, to Phoenix, or Santa Fe, or one of the other places my mother talked long distance with and dreamed of moving to. Now, except for work, she stayed put. We ordered our groceriesfrom the only market in town that delivered and quit church cold turkey, both of us.
    The bicycle was just sitting there one morning, and we figured it had to be from my father because there wasn’t anybody else. Aunt Rose had gone out to visit the national parks and not returned, authorizing a local real estate company to sell her property and send the money to an address in Aspen, Colorado. After the bicycle arrived, I kept expecting a convertible to pull up in front of the house any day, but none did. Once two men in a black car came and knocked on the door, wanting to know how they could get in touch with my father. They said he’d come into some money. My mother offered to hold on to it for them, but they said they had to give it to him personally.
    One day when I was downtown I heard somebody yell. “Hey! Sam’s Kid!” and I recognized Wussy standing out in front of the pool hall. I was glad to see him, and he looked just like I remembered. He was even wearing the same kind of shapeless hat, though this one wasn’t decorated with fishhooks. We shook hands. His was large and brown. Man-colored.
    “Good-lookin’ bike,” he said.
    “My father gave it to me,” I said, hoping fervently that it was true, or that if it wasn’t, Wussy wouldn’t know.
    “You look a little better than the last time I saw you,” he said, as if it had been only a few days and not five years. “Your old lady still shooting at people?”
    I told him that he and my father had been the last, that she didn’t even own a gun anymore. He looked relieved, as if he’d been on the lookout for her all along and was glad he could give it up. I wanted to ask him about my father, but I couldn’t think of a way. Having dropped his name in connection with the bike, I didn’t want to admit I wasn’t even sure if he was in Mohawk.
    “Some men came by last week,” I told him, explaining about the money they had for my father.
    Wussy was interested. “Big guys? Black car?”
    I said yes.
    “If they come by again, tell them he went up to Alaska to work road construction.”
    “Alaska?” I said, my heart falling.
    “Right,” Wussy said, but he must have noticed how disappointed I was. “He’ll be back pretty quick,” he said. “You’ll lookup some day and there he’ll be. That’s the way with Sammy. It don’t do no good to wait.”
    We said goodbye and I climbed back on my bike.
    “You ever go fishing?” he called after me.
    I shook my head no.
    “Too bad,” he said. “You were an alright fisherman. Patient, too.”
    So, I took Wussy’s advice and stopped waiting. One day I’d look up and there he’d be, I told myself. As it turned out, the direction was the only thing Wussy got wrong.
    Most of the labyrinthian dirt trails in Myrtle Park ended up in somebody’s backyard if you followed them far enough, but there were so many and they were so complex that you could get all turned around, and by the time you came down out of the maze you’d be on the opposite side of town from where you thought you were. One of my favorite trails wound through the densest part of the park ending at the edge of a steep dirt embankment, at the foot of which was a shack with a sheet metal roof that gleamed in the sun. In the clearing around the shack were high mounds of junk. There were stacks of bald tires, car bodies without hoods, rusted hubcaps, foaming car batteries, splintered wooden ladders, broken sheets of fiberglass, brown bed springs. It was interesting to look down from the top of the embankment at all that junk, because a lot of it you couldn’t even identify and it was fun to see if you could figure out what it had once been used for. Sometimes stray dogs found their way into that clearing and