The Risk Pool

who owed him what, but he thought he did, and the more broke he got, the more clearly his memory functioned. Virtually everyone triggered some vague recollection, and whoever appeared in the doorway to Harry’s diner would be greeted with a “Look at
this
deadbeat!” And, likely as not, the accused would in fact
be
a deadbeat, but a deadbeat who understood that my father’s memory was of the most shadowy and elusive character. Having escaped payment for six months, they refused to pay up now and were deeply indignant when my father recollected a debt far larger than was actually incurred. Many of Harry’s regular customers had taken to sidling along the front wall of the diner and peeking in to make sure that my father was someplace else before entering.
    “Give your goddamn
kid
a break, too,” Untemeyer said. His own business generally tailed off when Harry’s did. “How the hell do you put up with him twenty-four hours a day? Tell me that.”
    I shrugged. In truth, I probably saw less of him than Untemeyer himself. There was school, of course, until the middle of the afternoon, and after dinner he’d usually disappear, sometimes to playpoker, sometimes to visit The Elms to see Eileen and talk to Mike, the bartender. About the only time I saw him was in the late afternoon, like now. I could usually figure on finding him at Harry’s when I got off school. Sometimes, we’d eat dinner there. Other times at Eileen’s. If he wasn’t around, I’d eat dinner by myself in the apartment overlooking the gray, deserted Main Street below.
    Of the three, I most hated those dinners at Eileen’s because they were like sitting atop a powderkeg. When my father had money, we’d stop at the market and buy groceries to bring with us. Lately, though, he’d been taking a beating at the poker table and the bookmakers’, which meant that when we turned up, it would be empty-handed. That wouldn’t have bothered him so much if it didn’t rob my father of his trump card with Eileen’s son Drew, whom my father rode hard about freeloading off his mother. “It must be supper time,” my father would say when we’d hear the motorcycle, usually still a couple blocks down the street.
    “Lay off of him,” Eileen would warn.
    Lately, my father didn’t have much to say, though that, it seemed to me, actually increased the tension, because Drew Littler sensed that for the moment, anyway, he had the upper hand. The last time we’d gone over to the Littlers’ for dinner, the cycle had been parked in the garage and Drew had lifted his blond head from a comic book when we came in and called out, “Must be supper time,” to his mother.
    That had been over a week ago, and we hadn’t been back since.
    My father dug into his pocket and came up with two folded bills, tossing one on the table in front of me. “Well?” he said.
    I picked up the dollar bill and studied it. “Liars” was one of our favorite pastimes. Played with the serial numbers of dollar bills, the game developed some of the same intellectual rigors as handicapping horses. If you said four fives and there were only two fives on
your
dollar bill, then there had better be two more on the bill your opponent was holding. If there weren’t, and you were called upon to produce the four fives you’d claimed the existence of, you lost your bill. The idea was to trick your opponent into making a claim he’d have to support entirely on his own. If you could convince him that your bill contained, say, threes, and it was in reality devoid of threes, you could challenge him later if he claimed to have an inordinate number of them. It was a wickedlittle game that placed a premium on confident bluffing, misdirection and rapid analysis of probability.
    “What am I going to do with you if I go someplace for a while?”
    I shrugged and called three deuces.
    He studied his bill disinterestedly. “Three fives.”
    “Three eights,” I said, holding my breath. There wasn’t a single eight on my bill; I was hoping to trap him into coming back to eights later on. I did have three fives, but fives were what he’d just called and he might be using the same strategy on me.
    “Four fives,” he said.
    “Four eights,” I said, a little too quickly, trying to sound casual.
    “Your ass, four eights,” he said, but we always played strict rules. You had to say “liar.” “I know you’re not telling the truth, but I’ll let you skate this once because I’ve got five