The Risk Pool

The only other sound was the faint whirr of the cars on the highway below, their headlights flickering in and out of the trees.
    I couldn’t get over how strange it felt to be looking at the house up close, and even stranger to be in the company of Drew Littler. It was like learning that the girl you had a secret crush on for a very long time was also the object of somebody else’s affections. Somebody you doubted was worthy of her. “Let’s go,” I said. “We shouldn’t be up here. The sign said private road.”
    My companion shrugged. “It’s a free country. Besides. This house is going to be mine someday.”
    I must have made a sound, because he looked over his shoulder at me.
    “You wait and see if it don’t.”
    I shrugged.
    It didn’t matter much if I wanted to go. Drew didn’t. So we sat there and stared at the house and the long sloping lawn. If I’d been there alone, it would have been okay, but I could not enjoy the house from the back of Drew Littler’s motorcycle. I felt like telling him that he was nuts to think he’d ever own a house like this one, any more than I would. It was dumb to kid himself. I didn’t say it, of course, but I was surprised to discover myself so blackly angry at his presumption. Did he imagine he was going to come into a fortune just because he could bench-press more than anybody in Mohawk, assuming he
could
bench more than anybody? The dancing blue vein on his broad forehead embodied his only skill as far as I could see. Did he actually see himself seated at the head of the long mahogany table (I imagined one like that in the rectory of Our Lady of Sorrows) in the rectangular dining room, shoveling mounds of white mashed potatoes onto the gleaming china?
    “Come on,” I said. “They’ll be wondering where we are.”
    “Your ass,” he said quietly. “They’ll be glad. Your old man is probably banging her right now.”
    He was still staring at the house, but his expression had gone bad, as if he’d seen something nasty through one of the windows.
    My own face must have borne a similar expression, because when Drew looked at me he said, “You didn’t know they go upstairs so he can crawl on top and put it to her?”
    His voice was so full of contempt (for me, it seemed then) that I had to lie. “Sure,” I said.
    He started up the engine. “Your ass, you did.”
    A man came out of the jewel house and stood on the patio, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. If I hadn’t been thinking about my father and Eileen Littler, I might have been able to take pleasure in the fact that I knew the man’s name. He was Jack Ward, and he was standing there trying to figure out more ways to spend money. When Drew revved the engine, the man looked up and saw us, but I doubted the angry revving bothered him much.
    Drew circled the bike once, then threw us back down toward the darkness of the highway below. “Fuck him!” he bellowed over the roar of the bike. “Fuck them all!”
    On Saturday mornings I went to see my mother, and the few hours I spent at our old house were always the strangest of my week, which is saying a good deal when you lived with Sam Hall the rest of the time. To begin with, the house itself had changed, a fact I attributed to so little of it being lived in. The air downstairs seemed full of dust, millions of particles suspended in midair. No doubt this was largely the effect of the heavy curtains remaining closed, only one of two windows leaking a narrow slant of light in which the universe of atoms played. The kitchen was in the back of the house, and the maple darkened and obscured the yard with its lush foliage and allowed only late afternoon light to filter through the kitchen windows. I suspected, though I could not be certain, that the gray kitchen now represented the outer extremity of my mother’s world, and that she ventured down into it no more than once a day.
    For a while I tried to convince myself that our arrangement was working and that, as she herself continued to insist, all she needed was a little time alone to draw things back together. She had waged her solitary war with the outside world too long. Only time would heal her wounds, restore her health. But I was gone only a month or so before I began to notice her face hollowing and the flesh along her upper arms growing slack. Like a cave-dweller,her skin became sallow, then almost translucent, and when I mentioned that I didn’t think she was looking well, she responded