The Risk Pool

sniffed among the mounds, looking for the right place to lift a leg. When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God.
    One afternoon, not long after I ran into Wussy, I stopped along the embankment and leaned my bike up against a tree. There weren’t any dogs to convert, so I just sat. It was quiet and cool, and you could barely hear the cars that whizzed by on the invisible highway beyond the trees. Still further, about a mile away on a hill of its own, a white jewel of a house sparkled in the sun. Green lawns sloped down into the trees on each side. There had to be a road to get up there, but you couldn’t see it. Sometimes I wondered what the view must be like from there. I was willing to bet you could see all the way to the river.
    I collected pebbles until I had a small pile. When there weren’t any dogs, I selected at random some target below and tested my marksmanship. Today, I selected the open window of a rusted-out DeSoto. The angle made it a challenge. Most of the pebbles just plinked off the roof. After a while I ran out of pebbles and started to unearth a rock at my feet. It had looked tossable until I started to uncover it and saw that the rock was about the size of a softball and far too heavy to throw with accuracy. I doubted I’d even be able to hit the roof of the shack directly below, a target I had always spurned as unchallenging.
    The rock hit near the peak of the corrugated roof like a gunshot, then banged down into the rain gutter. The reverberation had not even died when the door of the shack blew open and a man came out on a dead run. He didn’t look up into the park or anywhere. He just ran, and if he hadn’t been headed in the opposite direction, I’d have been running too, because the last thing I expected was for somebody to be inside that shack. At first I thought the man was trying to catch whoever threw the stone and was confused about the direction the attack had been launched from. But as I watched him tack left, then right among the mounds, head down, even as he hurtled fenders and sharp, ragged fiberglass, I realized he wasn’t chasing. He was running away. He looked back over his shoulder just once before he disappeared into the trees.
    It did not matter that I had not seen him in over five years. The surprise was replaced almost immediately with the same tightness in my chest that I’d felt the afternoon outside school when he’d leaned across the seat of the white convertible to open the passenger-side door. Sam Hall wasn’t in Alaska. He was in Mohawk. I didn’t care what anybody said. I knew my own father.
    Off and on for the rest of the summer I returned to the embankment in Myrtle Park, but the shack remained uninhabited, and when I rattled stones off the sheet metal roof, nobody bolted. Occasionally, shabby men appeared in the clearing below to root around in the trash mounds, removing a door handle from a rusted-out car body perhaps, then disappearing back into the trees in the general direction of the highway. I continued to mystify dogs until one day a mangy yellow cur caught sight of me, and the look on his face clearly said, “Aha!” as if my visible presenceresolved an issue that had troubled him for a long time. He would spread the word.
    In contrast to the scene below was the white jewel of a house on the other side of the highway. It occupied the whole top of the hill, and on sunny days its whiteness reflected the sun like a tiny mirror directed precisely into my eyes. What would it be like to live in such a house? Though it looked very small in the distance, I knew up close it had to be huge. It drew the sun like a magnet, and I would have liked to see it up close, though I doubted you could get there from where I sat. There were two hundred yards of thick woods between me and the busy highway, then another quarter mile or so of the same before you even got to the vast sloping lawn. There had to be a road, probably on the other side of the hill, and, anyway, I wasn’t permitted to cross the highway on my bicycle.
    It occurred to me that summer, from my perch in Myrtle Park, that there might be any number of corrugated shacks in my personal future, but no jeweled houses. I could think of no good reason for my father to be living in such a place, if that’s what he had been doing there, any more than I could think why he had run away. But if my father had ended up in such a place, mightn’t the same happen to me? Until