The Risk Pool

full retreat. These men were fickle though, and they said much the same things to all passing women.
    One of my father’s favorite anecdotes concerned a man called Waxy—I was introduced to him one Saturday afternoon in the Mohawk Grill—who had a fine eye for shapes. His favorite roost was the doorway of the pool hall on South Main, from which vantage point he could keep an eye on the action inside and out. “Get a load of
this
,” he would say out of the corner of his mouth when something worthwhile appeared on the horizon. He could isolate an exceptional set of knockers on a crowded street, then hone in and track them like radar. “Scope
this
,” he said one evening just as my father emerged from the pool hall. It took a minute, but my father located the object of Waxy’s fixed stare beneath the traffic light at The Four Corners. “It’s your wife, Wax,” my father said. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Waxy shook his head, gravely disappointed. “Too bad,” he said. “It had potential.”
    After a few visits to the Mohawk Grill, I much preferred it to the lunch counter at the shabby Mohawk Woolworth’s which, it then occurred to me, wasn’t such a great deal. The food at the dime store looked all right in the bright pictures on the wall, but it was invariably disappointing on the plate. Usually, I contented myself with a hamburger and Coke, sixty cents total, but I yearned for one of the “Fabulous Woolworth Triple-Decker Club Sandwiches” depicted in Technicolor above the milk machine. These were extravagantly expensive—a dollar ten—and I never saw anybody order one. I wondered if such a sandwich could be eaten by one person. Lettuce, bacon, red tomato, cheese, and turkey spilled out everywhere. The sandwich was so full that toothpicks were required to hold it together.
    After the second Sunday I cleaned for Rose, I brought a crisp five the next day to the Woolworth’s counter. The waitress regarded it suspiciously, feeling it carefully with her thumb and forefinger, before going over to the sandwich board. “What’s the matter?” she wanted to know when she set the club sandwich in front of me. I was staring alternately at the plate in front of me and the picture above the milk machine, trying to discover adiscrepancy that would hold up. There
was
a fragmented bacon strip, a thin slice of greenish tomato, a thick, spotted spine of lettuce, even some gray turkey. “Toothpicks!” I said angrily. “I
want
my toothpicks!”
    At the Mohawk Grill, Harry Saunders, the big ornery-looking cook, didn’t gyp you. In fact, for twenty-five cents he would fill a plate with hot, glistening french fries, and even ladle brown gravy over them if you asked him. They were a meal. People who ate at Harry’s didn’t go away starved. What’s more, it was a lively place, especially in the winter, when work in the mills slowed and half of Mohawk was on unemployment. My father usually quit construction in November when it got too cold to work comfortably out of doors. Some afternoons and most evenings there was a poker game up above the grill, and when I lost track of my father for a while I’d know where to find him. If he wasn’t at the Mohawk Grill there was usually somebody there who had seen him within the last few hours and knew where he was. If I needed to get in touch with him, I’d just go across the street and tell Harry, and then a couple hours later he’d turn up.
    Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up. Tree was usually around when he wasn’t out visiting Alice, and my old friend Skinny Donovan, who had few duties at the rectory during the winter months, divided his time about equally between the pool hall, Greenie’s Tavern and the Mohawk Grill. He seemed pleased that I had fallen from grace at Our Lady of Sorrows, and I got the impression that life had become more tolerable there now that I wasn’t seated at the right hand of the fathers. There was a new assistant priest, apparently. An alright Irishman who wasn’t too good to share a belt from the flask. The Monsignor was still sick and dying, but strictly at his own pace.
    The Mohawk Grill was also an educational place, and it was here that I learned to handicap horses. There was always a racing form lying around, and usually