The Risk Pool

said something nice, and again for lack of musculature. I liked Eileen a great deal. I liked the way she didn’t get bent out of shape about things. My mother could have learned all sorts of things from her if she’d felt like it.
    Actually, Drew and I got along fine too. After dinner I’d go out to the garage with him and act as spotter while he bench pressed. He was only five-ten, three inches shorter than my father, and he had a fleshy midriff, but his arms and shoulders were massive. I very much admired his strength. When he lay on his back on the narrow bench, his blond hair hung straight down and a single blue vein on his broad forehead pulsed when he held his breath before exploding into the lift. The weight of the bar was something he seemed to take personally, as if in his imagination he had infused the cold metal with life and personality. He shoved the steel up and out of his way with savage contempt, as if its mere presence offended him. On those occasions when he misjudged his strength and needed me to help guide the wobbling bar back to its resting place, his expression darkened and he would give up, refusing to take weight off the bar, refusing to try a second lift. He had failed, and that was all there was to it. He would then turn his attention to the cycle, pulling it all apart, as if while lying on his back beneath the great weight of the bar, he’d suddenly remembered something wrong with the way it was running. He’d spend the rest of the evening cursing the machine.
    But Drew was seldom defeated by the bar, and when his first lift was successful, he would continue his workout until exhaustionfinally overtook him. Then he would get up from the bench—the only lifting he seemed interested in was from flat on his back—his chest swelling with accomplishment, his blond hair wet with perspiration, the blue vein on his forehead still throbbing intensely, as if its angry excited pulsing contained the very center of his being. Then he would fling one leg over the bike, kick back the stand, and roar down the steep drive. You could hear him changing gears all the way to the highway, and by the time he returned half an hour later his pale hair would be dry again and the blue vein gone from his forehead.
    Sometimes, depending on his mood, he would take me for a ride. The first time scared me good, because he took off before I could locate the pegs to rest my feet on, and when we took sharp turns my feet went straight out like wings. Leaning into the turns seemed foolhardy, and for a long time I refused to do it. Often I leaned in the opposite direction to make up for what Drew was doing in front of me, so that our bodies formed a V, Drew leaning into the danger, I away from it. Eventually I got better, but seeing the pavement whiz by a few inches beneath my kneecap was something I never did get used to.
    In the beginning we just circumnavigated a few blocks, but our rides got progressively longer. One night in late October, instead of just disturbing a few peaceful streets, Drew took us out to the highway and let the bike full out. On our right, the dark expanse of Myrtle Park, rising abruptly against the dusk, flew by. On the left, off in the distance, was the radio tower, its twin red lights pulsing. I hadn’t as much hair as Drew, but what I did have stood straight up and I felt the exhilaration of raw speed so strongly that I had all I could do not to howl in animal pleasure. Drew was rock solid as the bike itself, and together we leaned into the turns.
    About a mile beyond Myrtle Park we left the highway and followed a narrow, winding road until we came to a clearing at the top of a steep crest, and there before us, suddenly, was my white jewel house, the one I always wondered about from my perch in Myrtle Park. It looked different now, but I knew it had to be the same house. There could be no other like it in Mohawk, or in the entire county, or in the whole world. Drew pulled the bike over, let the engine die, and we just sat there looking at it, a mere hundred yards away.
    Up close, it did not glisten the way it appeared to from across the highway, but the house was even more vast and impressivethan I had imagined. Its tall TV antenna caught the last ray of sunlight from behind the park, but everything else—the house itself and the surrounding lawn and woods were deepening purple, the highway below almost black.
    “Gotta be twenty rooms in there,” Drew said, his voice unexpectedly loud.