The Risk Pool

fives.”
    He had me and I knew it. I had three fives myself. No way he’d believe five eights. My only hope was that he too had three fives. That would make six between us.
    “Six fives,” I said.
    He was nodding and flicking his tubed-up bill with his black thumb and forefinger. “You better have five of them, you liar.”
    He unrolled his bill and showed it to me. One measly five. “If I could chain you in the basement and play you for a living, I wouldn’t have to worry about working.” That was one of his favorite lines, and he used it whenever we played Liars. When I won, which was seldom, he always accused me of having a no-brainer bill, the kind that had maybe four deuces on it and you couldn’t lose with it.
    “I’d be all right,” I said, though I hoped he wouldn’t go anywhere.
    He ran his hands through his hair. “Well, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll make out, somehow. White people don’t starve in America.”
    I wasn’t worried about starving. I’d been banking practically all of the money I made cleaning Rose’s and could have loaned my father a couple hundred dollars if there had been a good enough reason to. But then we really would be broke, and I preferred to let him just think we were. I’d save us if I had to, but not until I became convinced there was no other way. Right now we were only a hundred or so into Harry and two months behind on rent. The situation was far from desperate.
    Before we left, my father boxed a number with Untemeyer (healways had a dollar for that purpose) and then we crossed the street to our apartment, climbing the two dark flights of stairs. The local news was on when we came in. I watched while my father read the sports in the morning paper that Harry let him take with us. When the weatherman came on, he talked about how cold it was everywhere, even the desert Southwest, which was recording its lowest temperatures on record. They showed pictures of Phoenix, Arizona.
    “Look at the goddamn snow,” my father said seriously, as if snow were not a permanent condition on our television set. I was mentally adding up how much he would have lost if anybody had taken his wager.
    He must have been doing the same, because he shook his head and said, “Some fucking thing’s gotta give here. And quick, too.”
    A few days later my father’s personal fortunes took a turn for the better. Suddenly, there was money. Harry eyed him suspiciously as my father peeled bills off a sizable roll, but he took the money and that squared us at the Mohawk Grill. He also paid our back rent, along with the next month’s, thus guaranteeing that we’d be all right until he started work in the spring. The only other thing was to pay his bar tabs, especially the one at The Elms. He’d stopped going there when it got too steep, not wanting to embarrass Eileen. “Not that Mike gives a shit,” he told me. “Mike’s all right.”
    Mike was my favorite bartender. Whenever my father and I came in on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, he rang up No Sale and slapped a couple quarters on the bar for the jukebox so I could play Elvis and my own personal favorite, Duane Eddy. He let me sit at the bar, too, which I didn’t always get to do in some of the lesser dives my father brought me to. My father explained that in the better joints you didn’t have to worry because the cops stayed away unless they were called. In places like Greenie’s, where the men from the mills drank, the bartenders had to be careful, but Mike said never mind cops, as if he weren’t convinced of their existence. Sit at the bar. Eat peanuts. Watch the ball game. Anybody doesn’t like it, tough. Mike had the shiniest black hair I’d ever seen. His fingers were pink and elegant, his nails scrubbed white. He always ignored my father, speaking first to me. “So,” he would say. “How’s he treating you?”
    When I said good, he’d remind me that I didn’t have to live with such a stiff if I didn’t want to. I could come live with him and his wife upstairs over the restaurant. Today, though, he put his hand over his heart and pretended to stagger when he saw us.
    My father nodded knowingly. “If I had all your money, I’d have a weak ticker too. I’d be scared somebody else might get a dollar or two.”
    We took stools near the end of the empty bar. Mike put a quarter in front of me.
    “Take it,” my father said. “It’s his one good deed. When was the last time you bought a