The Risk Pool

wait that long?”
    We put the bags of groceries on the dinette. Just in time, in my case, because the blood had weakened the paper and the roasts were threatening to plunge through. My hand and wrist were red and dripping.
    My father started to unload meat.
    “The car, Sam,” Eileen said, elbowing him out of the way. “You’re dripping blood on my floor. I just mopped it.”
    “Sorry,” my father said, as if he wasn’t, particularly.
    Outside, the motorcycle’s engine roared to life, and I heard a patch of rubber being laid on the street below. At first, I thought Drew had decided to ride off someplace, but then I saw his head flash by the dining room window heading up the drive. Immediately following, there was a dull thud; the engine coughed once and died.
    My father dried his hands on a paper towel and peered out the kitchen window, shaking his head in disbelief.
    I followed Eileen outside. The motorcycle was angled crazily, deep in the snowbank next to our car, its front wheel unaccountably up in the air. Drew had apparently tried to blast through the snow. The hard-packed part at the edge of the pavement had accepted the weight of the bike, but then the cycle had sunk seat-deep. Drew was still on it, looking like an astronaut awaiting launch. He got off reluctantly, himself sinking thigh-deep in the snow.
    “Terrific,” Eileen said.
    “Tell your friend,” her son said.
    My father came out, still drying his hands on the towel. “I never would have thought to park it there, Zero.”
    “Kiss my ass.”
    “Let me get this out of your way,” my father said, indicating our car.
    “Screw that rust bucket. Give me a hand with the chopper.”
    “What,” my father said. “A big strong guy like you? Just lift it right out.”
    “You think
you
could?”
    “Not me,” my father admitted. “But then I wouldn’t have put it there to begin with.”
    “Quit acting like children, the two of you,” Eileen said. “Help him, will you.”
    But my father was having too good a time. He might help, eventually. But not yet. “What good is it to lift weights all day if you can’t pick your own bike out of a snowbank?” he wanted to know.
    “Screw yourself then,” Drew said. “I’ll settle with you later.”
    “Wait about twenty years is my advice. And even then I’d be careful.”
    Then he nudged me in the shoulder hard enough to make me take one step forward. “Go help Dumbbell,” he said. “Take the heavy end.”
    Drew snorted at the suggestion that I might be able to help, and even Eileen smiled, as if the one thing the three of them could agree on was that I was the weakling of the group. I flushed angrily at that and without thinking climbed the snowbank and positioned myself next to the bike. Grabbing the seat with both hands, I pulled hard, actually imagining the cycle would come free of the snow, which had already begun to freeze around the back wheel. Instead, I found myself seated in the snow, my feet having gone out from under me, which everybody thought was pretty funny.
    When I followed Eileen and my father back into the house, leaving Drew to shovel the snow away from his half-buried bike, I was full of hatred so black that I can still taste it now, almost twenty-five years later. When I had fallen, one leg had gone under the bike and my groin had come in violent contact with the rear tire, sending waves of nausea over me like surf. At that moment, I hated them all blackly—my father, Eileen and Drew Littler, everybody. Even my poor mother, who lay wasting toward oblivion in a big strange bed in Schenectady. In the cold agony ofsurging pain and humiliation, I would have been content to consign them all to everlasting perdition. I’d have watched the flames licking them with perfect equanimity.
    “Do a roast,” my father suggested.
    It was Eileen’s turn to sling the unoffending meat this time, and that’s what she was doing, bouncing packages off the sides of her freezer. Altercations between my father and Drew always infuriated her, but my guess was that there was more to it in this instance. She’d been ready to take my father on when he walked in the door. The episode with the cycle had distracted her, but now she had remembered whatever it was that had angered her before. My father looked like he knew what was on her mind and wished he didn’t. He probably figured that getting her to cook a roast would have a calming effect. You couldn’t cook a roast and stay mad at the