The Risk Pool

she screamed.
    “So what?” my father countered. “I don’t love you either.”
    Surprised or not, she did not miss a beat. “I want a divorce.”
    “Then you can’t have one,” my father said.
    “I don’t need your permission.”
    “Like hell you don’t,” he said. “And you’ll need more than a candy-ass lawyer and a cheap lock to keep me out of my own house.” By way of punctuation, he put his shoulder into the door, which buckled but did not give.
    “This is my father’s house, Sam Hall.
You
never had anything and you never will.”
    “If you aren’t going to open that door,” he warned, “you’d better stand back out of the way.”
    My mother did as she was told, but just then a police cruiser pulled up and my father vaulted the porch railing and headed off through the deep snow in back of the house. One of the cops gavechase while the other circled the block in the car, cutting off my father’s escape routes. It must have been quite a spectacle, the one cop chasing, until he was tuckered out, yelling, “We know who you are!” and my father shouting over his shoulder, “So what?” He knew nobody was going to shoot him for what he’d done (what
had
he done, now that he thought about it?). A man certainly had the right to enter his own house and shout at his own wife, which was exactly what she’d keep being until
he
decided to divorce
her
.
    It must have looked like a game of tag. All the neighbors came out on their back porches and watched, cheering my father, who dodged and veered expertly beyond the outstretched arms of the pursuing cops, for within minutes, the backyards of our block were lousy with uniformed men who finally succeeded in forming a wide ring and then shrinking it, the neighbors’ boos at this unfair tactic ringing in their ears. My mother watched from the back porch as the tough, wet, angry cops closed in on my father. She pretty much decided right there against the divorce idea.
    It dawned on her much later that the best way of ensuring my father’s absence was to demand he shoulder his share of the burden of raising his son. But until then, life was rich in our neighborhood. When he got out of jail, my father would make a beeline for my mother’s house (she’d had his things put in storage and changed the locks, which to her mind pretty much settled the matter of ownership), where he’d be arrested again for disturbing the peace. His visits to the Mohawk County jail got progressively longer, and so each time he got out he was madder than before. Finally, one of his buddies on the Mohawk P.D. took him aside and told him to stay the hell away from Third Avenue, because the judge was all through fooling around. Next time he was run in, he’d be in the slam a good long while. Since that was the way things stood, my father promised he’d be a good boy and go home, wherever that might be. Since one place was as good as another, he rented a room across from the police station so they’d know right where to find him. He borrowed some money and got a couple things out of storage and set them in the middle of the rented room. Then he went out again.
    He started drinking around three in the afternoon and by dinnertime found a poker game, a good one, as luck would have it, with all good guys and no problems. Except that by ten my father had lost what he had on him and had to leave the game in searchof a soft touch. That time of night, finding somebody with a spare hundred on him was no breeze, even though everybody knew Sam Hall was good for it. He hit a couple of likely spots, then started on the unlikely ones. He got some drinks bought for him, sort of consolation, by people who wouldn’t or couldn’t loan him serious cash. Midnight found him in the bar of The Elms, a classy restaurant on the outskirts of town, where he tried to put the touch on Jimmy Albanese, and who should walk in but F. William Peterson, and on his arm a good-looking young woman who happened not to be his wife, but was surely someone’s. The lawyer took her to a dark, corner booth and they disappeared into its shadows. When the cocktail waitress came back to the bar with their order, my father said he’d cover the round and would she tell his friends “Up the Irish.” When F. William Peterson looked over and saw my grinning father with his glass raised, the blood drained from his face. He recognized his former assailant from the diner, of course, and had in fact been on the lookout for