The Risk Pool

couldn’t figure. How could you be sure something wouldn’t work until it didn’t? And even if my father wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the prospect (he’d said “you better” as if only in a terribly imperfect world would it be preferable that I live with him “for a while”), so what? Maybe it would work anyway. “Maybe,” I said. “For a while.”

10
    Downtown Mohawk had never been much to look at and was never exactly prosperous, but it had once been whole, at least. No more. The old hotel, the most elegant of the structures along Main, had come down when I was eight, leaving a large gap in the center of the block. The rubble had been quickly removed, the space graded and blacktopped, parking meters installed. But the effect was unsettling. There was no longer an unbroken corridor of three-story buildings, and the vista now offered by the new parking lot was like a glimpse behind a painted stage backdrop in a theater, all rusted pulleys and frayed ropes and dark, smoky windows. With the demolition of the Mohawk Grand, the illusion of a thriving downtown was forever shattered, and within thenext few years three more buildings were vacated, condemned, and summarily razed, all on the same side of the street. Disturbed by the implications of this trend, the city council had commissioned a huge sign to be painted on the now visible side of one of the adjacent buildings. SHOP DOWNTOWN MOHAWK it began, in big block letters ten feet tall, “Where There’s Always Plenty Of Parking.”
    And then still other buildings came down, giving the street a gap-toothed appearance further emphasized when smaller, one-story, strangely temporary-looking buildings were erected as an alternative to the parking lots that were fast becoming the town’s long suit. The remaining three-story buildings all exhibited narrow fissures from their stone crowns, down brick faces, all the way to the street. It was in front of one of these—Klein’s Department Store—that my father parked his cream-colored Mercury convertible that afternoon. There was a big empty lot next door, but my father pulled up, one wheel over the curb, right beneath a no parking sign. I thought at first that he was planning to go into the A&P up the street, probably to get something for our dinner.
    “Well?” he said. He had gotten out of the car and was standing on the sidewalk. “Grab something.”
    On the backseat of the convertible amid the usual Sam Hall clutter—greasy tools, rags, an old hooded sweatshirt, junk mail—were the two cardboard boxes we’d filled with the contents of my dresser and closet.
    He raised the hood of the trunk, pulled out the bike, and headed for a dark doorway beneath an unlit brick arch. I looked up at the black third-story windows, my heart sinking. I grabbed the smaller box with my underwear and socks, leaving on the seat the larger box containing my shirts, pants, sweaters, and jackets.
    The door he had disappeared through had “Rose’s Beauty Salon” stenciled on the window, several letters flaked or missing. Inside, the narrow flight of stairs was dark, with no handrail on either side. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling at the second-floor landing. At the third there was a foyer and two doors. One said, ROS ’S BE TY S LON . Inexplicably, the same letters were missing on the upstairs and downstairs doors. As my father inserted the key into the other door, which had the words ACCOUNTING DEPT stenciled in big black letters, a woman with a large beehive of bright red hair emerged from the beauty parlor.
    “Jesus Christ, you scared me, Sammy,” she said, staring quizzicallyat the bike he was carrying, as if it presented a riddle my own presence did little to solve.
    “What are you scared of, rape?” my father said.
    “I wish,” she told my father. “Who’s the kid?”
    “Meet Rose,” my father said. “She’s all right for a red-headed Polack.”
    “Polack and proud of it,” Rose said. She offered me a hand full of nails painted the same shade as the beehive. I balanced my cardboard box and shook. “Rape I could handle,” she said, looking right at me, as if I had been contemplating it. “It’s the goddamn robbers that scare me. This used to be a nice town.”
    “When?” my father said.
    “Way back.”
    “I don’t go as far back as you, Rose.”
    “Like hell you don’t,” Rose said. “I seem to recollect graduating with a kid named Sam Hall.”
    “Not me.”
    “Not you.” She