The Risk Pool

department, never on display). I had told myself that the store would never be aware of such trivial losses, that the truest test of my ethics was that I had the perfect opportunity to steal a great deal, yet took only the cheapest items. But try as I might to absolve myself, the petty thefts ate at me, especially at night when I recollected how much money I had in my account at the bank.
    But tonight I had stolen big. My only criteria had been price and size. I had stolen out of pure malice and I felt not the slightest remorse, regretting only that I could not have carried more. If I could, I would have taken it all. What pure pleasure it would have been on Monday morning to see the store’s owner gape at the bare shelves, the astonished voices of the employees echoing off the walls and high ceilings in the emptiness I had left them.
    And so, after locking the house again from the inside, I went back to our apartment and waited for my father to return, not caring much whether he did or didn’t. Finally, I went to sleep and did not dream. During the night it snowed and the tall windows froze white and brittle. Winter. With a capital W.



16
    In February of that same year my father started talking about heading west for a while. There were lots of jobs on the interstates, and it was warm enough to work in your shirtsleeves.
    “In your imagination,” Untemeyer grumbled from his end of the Formica lunch counter in the Mohawk Grill.
    My father took that as an invitation to the sort of dispute that might earn him a dollar or two without leaving the warmth of the diner, or even getting up off the stool.
    “Phoenix,” my father said. “I bet it’s fifty degrees there right now. In fact, I’ll give you a fin for every degree under fifty. You give me one for every degree over.”
    “You got that kind of dough, how about paying your tab,” Harry said, without turning around from the grill. We’d been eating Harry’s food on credit for the last couple weeks while my father figured his next move. I gathered that things worked this way pretty much every year. My father was a seasonal kind of guy. May through November he was flush, but along about Thanksgiving when the road construction dwindled, he’d get himself laid off and collect unemployment until late spring. The unemployment was meager though, compared to his normal summer earnings.
    “If you didn’t piss money away, you wouldn’t be in this fix every year,” Untemeyer offered, ignoring my father’s proposed wager. “You ever hear of banks? They’ll take your money and hold it for you till you need it. Pay you interest on it too, you chowderhead.”
    “Five bucks for every degree under fifty,” my father reiterated.
    “Take a hike,” said the bookie.
    My father nudged me. I was seated comfortably on the stool next to him, absorbing the heat from Harry’s grill, thinking about nothing at all. “You can’t get to Unc,” my father said. His favorite nickname for Untemeyer was Uncle Willie. “He knows I’m right, the bastard. Hell, I bet it’s
sixty
in Phoenix.”
    That was what he would do now—sweeten the pot until there was no way he could win the bet. In another half hour he’d be giving five to one it was a hundred and ten in Phoenix in February, so worked up was he over the fabled heat in the desert Southwest. The only thing that would save him in the present instance was that, except for Harry and the bookie, we had the diner to ourselves, and neither of those two worthies was dumb enough to bet with a man who’d been bellyaching for a month that he couldn’t even afford to pay attention. Another time they might anyway, just to teach him a lesson, but not today.
    “
I
bet it’s not sixty,” I said. It was so cold outside the Mohawk Grill that I couldn’t imagine it being sixty anywhere.
    “Are you shitting me?” my father said, as if this finally settled it. I was God’s own fool, a militantly unteachable dimwit.
    “So
go
to fucking Phoenix,” Harry growled. “Give us all a break. Give my customers a break. Look at this place. Untemeyer’s the only one who’s not scared to come in here.”
    It was true. Come February, my father was bad for business. Summers he loaned money indiscriminately and generally forgot how much and to whom. But the higher the snowbanks grew along Main Street the more these foolish loans began to weigh on him and he became more than a little insistent about being paid back. True, he didn’t know