The Risk Pool

anything, he got up and went over to the cigarette machine, stopping on the way back at the other end of the bar where the two men who were there when we came in still sat. Tree and Alice were still holding hands midway down the rail. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Tree kept shrugging his shoulders and looking hangdog.
    On the wall above where I sat was a conical beer sign, and rather than think about my mother or the implications of lying to my father right after not seeing him for so long, I devoted myself to figuring out how it worked. A small bead of light traversed the cylinder in waves, elongating all the way up the crest and down the other side, but shrinking to bead size again in the trough, its color always changing, first red, then blue, then green, then yellow, then white. Somehow they got the bead of light to move, change shape and color, but I was stumped.
    I drank the rest of my soda, ate the cherry, and was still puzzling over the beer sign when my father came back and tossed the pack of Marlboros on the bar. “Don’t ever smoke,” he said, lighting up.
    “I saw Wussy,” I said, for something to say.
    “So he said.”
    I thought about mentioning the bike, but if it wasn’t my father who bought it, I didn’t want to know.
    “I’m surprised you remembered him.”
    I said I remembered all about the fishing trip—the gadget he’d given me, getting caught in the rain with the top down, ourdinner in the woods, the fishhook he’d gotten stuck in his thumb. He’d forgotten most of it, all except that part about my mother shooting at him when we got home. It felt funny to remember it all so clearly when he didn’t—like maybe I should have forgotten it too, since it wasn’t that important.
    He finished his beer and squeezed the life out of another cigarette, standing the gray butt up next to the other one, exhaling the last of the smoke through his nose.
    I looked at his black thumb and forefinger. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I said. It was something I’d always wanted to ask him.
    “Nah,” he said, placing his hand palm up on the bar so I could examine the hard, yellow-black skin that extended all the way down the inside of his thumb and forefinger. “You just have to do it all the time.”
    “Didn’t it hurt at first?”
    He shrugged. “So?”
    I tried to think of a so, but couldn’t come up with anything good.
    “So?” he repeated, cuffing me in the head to indicate that the subject wasn’t closed yet, and wouldn’t be until I offered at least a feeble argument against self-mutilation.
    I took a deep breath, and when the yellow comet’s tail of light became a pure white bead, I said, “I think there’s something wrong with her. She quit her job.”
    He nodded. “So I heard.”
    When the two men at the other end of the bar got up and left, Tree and Alice slid further away from us, and then I told him all of it. How she’d borrowed money on the house; how she never went out, even onto the porch anymore; how we telephoned for groceries; how I cashed checks at the bank, how she stayed in her room more and more, how I suspected that she was getting more scared every day; how her world was shrinking; how the ringing of the telephone caused her hands to shake uncontrollably; how sometimes she even seemed frightened of me. The only thing I left out was the business with Father Michaels. In the roughly two years since it had happened, I’d come to understand, gradually, what had happened, and what the consequences had been. The only thing I didn’t know was whether anyone else knew.
    In response to what I did tell him, my father just rapped the bar with his dead thumb. Somebody else would have asked all kinds of questions, but not him. It made me realize that I hadn’t wantedto tell him or anybody else because I doubted they’d believe me. And when my father did, I felt a sudden, almost overwhelming love for him, as if the five long intervening years amounted to nothing.
    At the other end of the bar, Tree leaned forward and kissed Alice. “Hey. Go get a room, why don’t you,” my father suggested, not that they paid any attention. Turning back to me he said, “Maybe you better come stay with me for a while. Unless you don’t want to …”
    I remember thinking at the time that it was dumb even to consider it, that I was not really my father’s son, that it wouldn’t work. But there were Alice and Tree, and I remember thinking that life was full of things you