The Risk Pool

owner came out, rubbing the back of his head. He looked pretty mad.
    Having circled around the other side, my father came at him from behind. The man must have seen where I was looking, but too late, and he found himself in a double nelson, his arms extended outward and dangling, like a big awkward bird. When he struggled, my father put a knee on his spine and lifted him off the ground. The man gurgled, but could not speak.
    My father rotated him so that the man’s right hip was toward me. “Take his gun and shoot him,” my father said.
    “It’s not l-l-loaded,” the man squeaked.
    “Well,
that’s
good,” said my father, releasing his victim. “I’d hate to think anybody’d give live ammunition to a blockhead like you.”
    “God d-d-damn you, Sammy,” the man said. “You’re gonna go too f-f-fucking far some day.” He shook my father’s hand reluctantly.
    “I wish you’d watch your l-l-language around my son,” my father said.
    “Screw you,” the man said, fingering the back of his head. “Is it bleeding?”
    My father examined the man’s head. “Not bad,” he said.
    “I oughta let you have one,” the man said. It didn’t sound like much of a threat.
    “Nah,” my father said. “I’m just trying to keep you sharp, Tree. What if there was a real evildoer around here?”
    The man called Tree went over and examined the screen door, which angled crazily now on its bent hinges. “You’re about as close to an evildoer as we get around here. By the w-way, somebody said you w-w-weren’t around, if anybody was to ask.”
    “That’s all straightened out,” my father said, glancing at me. “Just a couple of fellows I met out in Nevada.”
    “Too bad they didn’t work on your kneecaps. What’s the kid’s name?”
    My father told him.
    Tree looked me over and shook his head. “Never adm-m-mit he’s your old man,” he advised, “and m-maybe you got a chance.”
    “You hurt my f-f-fucking back, Sammy,” he added.
    My father told him to come with us. There was a little, dusty-looking tavern called The Lookout just outside the park entrance. There were a couple cars out front. One was a cream-colored Mercury convertible that looked like somebody had ridden hard, though there weren’t any bullet holes that I could see. “We’ll get Alice to rub your back,” my father said.
    “I’m w-working,” Tree said, nodding first at the shack, then at his uniform, as if these constituted proof. “Besides. Alice and I aren’t getting along.”
    “Since when?”
    “Since lately.” He stared down the dirt road at The Lookout with a mixture of longing and fear.
    “Suit yourself, Tree.”
    “I c-c-could drink a beer,” the man admitted, then considered everything for about two seconds. “Let me lock up, at least.”
    Inside the guard shack, he took some money out of a shoe box and put the thick wheel of red tickets in a drawer and locked it. Then he locked the inside door and did the best he could with the screen, throwing my father another malicious glance. “Park closes day after tomorrow anyways,” he said. “W-w-wouldn’t be much point in canning me, I guess.”
    He counted the money as we walked, then put a rubber band around it. “Took in f-f-fourteen dollars,” he said. “They gotta pay me twenty.”
    “That’s about right,” my father said. “Mayor of Mohawk works things the same way.”
    Tree shrugged. “July, we do two, three hundred a day. More on weekends.”
    “What’ll happen to that big roll of tickets when the park closes tomorrow?”
    “Disappear, p-p-probably.”
    My father nodded. “You’re all right, Tree.”
    The Lookout was dark and cool inside. When the screen door clapped shut behind us, I couldn’t make out anything but the flickering lights above the shuffleboard machine and the scripted fluorescent beer signs. Tree and my father went straight for the long bar at the other end of the room. They either knew where it was or were used to night soundings. They took stools at theopposite end of the bar from The Lookout’s two other patrons. I figured my father had forgotten me completely until he checked the stool next to his and I wasn’t there.
    “Well?” he said when I finally arrived. I climbed onto the vacant stool at the end of the bar, pleased that for once I seemed to understand the significance of his favorite question.
    A huge woman seated behind the bar was talking to the other customers. You couldn’t exactly see the stool she was