The Risk Pool

turned the corner onto my street, a white convertible fishtailed away from the curb and away up the hill, just as a police car appeared at the rise coming in the opposite direction. Several neighbors were out on their porches and pointed the way of the fleeing convertible, and the patrol car did a clumsy, two-stage U-turn.
    “This means war,” my mother said when she finally got calmed down. Her eyes were glowing like the tip of my father’s cigarette.
    War it was.
    My mother was game, at least in the beginning. Every time he turned up—he averaged twice a week—she called the cops. For my father’s part, it was a guerrilla war, hit and run, in and out. His favorite time was three in the morning below my mother’s window, drunk often as not, and ready to kick up a hell of a fuss before vanishing into the night thirty seconds before the copspulled up. He had a drunk’s radar where cops were concerned. One night during the second week of his marauding, a policeman was stationed around back after dark, so my father phoned instead of putting in a personal appearance. “How long is that fat cop planning to squat in the bushes back there?” he asked my mother. “You better draw your blinds, I know
that
son of a bitch.” In fact, he knew them all, and that was the problem. Every time a policeman was assigned to us, my father knew about it. Usually, he knew which one.
    Nobody seemed able to find out where he was living, though rumor had it that he was working road construction down the line in Albany. His nocturnal visits continued all summer, and by the end of August my mother was done in. At first he just accused her of instructing me to tell everybody he was dead, but he had other gripes too. He’d had a good look at me in the car that day, and he didn’t like the way I was turning out. In his opinion she was turning me into a little pussy. And speaking of pussy, he heard she’d been seen around town.
    This last accusation was beyond everything. In the six years he’d been gone, my mother might as well have been a nun. She could count the dates she’d had on one hand, she said. “That’s not the point,” he said. His long absence did not strike him as a mitigating circumstance, any more than did their mutual lack of tender feeling for each other. “You’re my wife,” he said. “And as long as you are, stay the hell home where you belong.”
    As I look back on this period in our troubled lives, what astonishes me is how little the trouble touched me. My father’s nocturnal raids seldom woke me fully, and the next morning I was only vaguely aware that something had happened during the night. On such mornings my mother always questioned me about how I’d slept, and when I said fine, her expression was equal parts relief and astonishment that it was possible for anybody to sleep through what invariably woke the neighbors. Probably I willed myself to sleep through those episodes, too afraid to wake up. I remember that summer as a nervous time. I was always on the lookout for the white convertible and under explicit instructions to run inside and tell my mother if it appeared.
    That year must have been a lonely one for my mother, who had to work all day at the phone company, then come home and endure the horror of being awakened in the middle of the night, sometimes out of sheer anticipation. She had no one to share herburdens with, your average six-year-old being an imperfect confidant. To make matters worse, she had scruples about the way she dealt with my father and even about the way she portrayed him to me. “No, he isn’t a bad man,” she responded to my surprise question one day. “He wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt you. He’s just careless. He wouldn’t look out for you the way I do.”
    I thought about him a lot that winter, though the cold weather and deep snow discouraged him from beneath my mother’s bedroom window. The few minutes I’d spent with him in the dirty white convertible had somehow changed everything, not that I could have explained how or why. It was as if I suddenly understood intuitively nameless things I hadn’t missed before becoming aware of them. I kept seeing his black thumb and forefinger snuffing out the red cigarette tip, a gesture I practiced with candy cigarettes until my mother caught me at it and wanted to know what I was doing. I knew better than to explain.
    It wasn’t that I loved him, of course. But when I thought about my father, my heart did