The Risk Pool

that Sam Hall had blown town. The lawyer also wanted to know if she’d like to go out with him sometime, what with Mrs. Peterson divorcing him and all.
    Mohawk didn’t see my father again for nearly six years, and my mother never got over what you could buy with fifty dollars, invested wisely.

2
    Even as a child, I never had much use for conventional honesty. I can’t remember my first lie, but I do recall the first one I was caught at. Many years later when I was at the university, I confessed it to a young woman I was infatuated with, and she used me for a case study in her psych class, in return for which I got to use her for nonacademic advantage. Here’s the story I told her. The true story, more or less, of my first imaginative untruth.
    I was a first grader in McKinley Elementary School (kindergarten was optional and we hadn’t opted), and word had gotten around among the other children that my father did not live withmy mother and me, an unusual circumstance in 1953 and one which made me the center of attention that September, the Mohawk Fair being over, and no real freaks (like the Heroin Monster: “See her, you’ll want to kill her!”) to gawk at for another year. My mother instructed me to say only that it was nobody’s business where my father lived, which suggests how little she understood children if she thought such a lame response would have any effect other than the inflaming of their natural, arrogant curiosity. Happily, I arrived at a more sensible solution to my problem. I informed everyone that my father was dead, and the beneficial effect of this intelligence I felt immediately. I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself.
    One day, not long after I began telling this lie, however, my teacher, Miss Holiday, took me by the hand and led me outside while the other children, obediently curled up on mats, had been instructed to nap. There at the curb was a lone, dirty white convertible. Inside was a man, and when he leaned across the front seat to open the passenger-side door, my heart did something funny and I stopped right where I was, Miss Holiday pressing up against me from behind. The man in the car had a gray chin, and the fingers that first encircled the steering wheel, then came toward me to release the door lock, were black and calloused. A cigarette dangled carelessly from the man’s lips, and bobbed when he spoke. “Thanks, young lady,” my father said.
    Miss Holiday wasn’t pressing against me anymore. Maybe she too was looking at his black fingers. “I don’t know about this,” she said. “I could lose my job.”
    “Nah,” my father said, and perhaps his failure to elaborate why not was just the right thing, because she suddenly nudged me into the car and scurried back up the walk.
    “Well?” said my father. I’ve often wondered whether he was as sure that I was his son as I was that he was my father. There was little enough physical resemblance at that stage. My hair was blond and curly, his wiry and black and bushy. Did he think that maybe the fool of a young woman had grabbed the wrong kid, or did he feel something when he saw me that said this is the one? “You know who I am?”
    I nodded.
    “Can you talk?”
    I nodded again, feeling my eyes fill.
    “Who am I?”
    I couldn’t force anything out, couldn’t look at him, except for the black thumb and finger which pressed the life out of the burning cigarette and deposited the stub in the full ashtray.
    “All right,” he said. “Who are
you
?”
    “Ned,” I gulped.
    “Ned Who?”
    “Ned Hall.”
    “Right. You know where the name Hall came from?”
    I shook my head. He was lighting another cigarette, and when he had done it, he tossed the still burning match into an ashtray, the flame inching down the cardboard stem, leaving it as black as my father’s thumb and forefinger.
    “Your mother tell you to say I was dead?”
    I shook my head.
    “Don’t lie to me.”
    I began to cry, because I wasn’t lying.
    “She’ll wish she hadn’t,” he said. “You can bet your ass.”
    He sat and smoked and couldn’t think of anything else to ask me. “You want to go back to school or do you want some ice cream at the dairy?”
    I reached for the door handle, which I couldn’t get to move. The black fingers came over and did it. By the time I got back inside, I was shaking so badly that Miss Holiday took me to see the nurse, who examined me, and finding a low-grade fever decided to drive me home. As we