The Risk Pool

one red hand under the seat, the other in the crotch beneath the frame and above the wheel, holding his squat position perfectly for a second before throwing himself back and up, his knees and arms straightening without quite locking. The bike stayed stuck for a second, then gave with an audible crack.
    He nearly lost his balance then, but somehow righted himself, still refusing to set the bike down. For a moment I thought he actually intended to clean and jerk it, but instead he turned with it, still held chest-high, 180 degrees and stepped with it over the snowbank. The rear wheel of the cycle caught the antenna of my father’s car and snapped it like a twig.
    A moment later he emerged from the dark garage and came toward the house. On the way he stopped and picked up the busted antenna, used the palm of his hand to reduce its length, then his thumb and forefinger to stretch it full again, whereupon he cocked his arm and whistled the antenna out over the top of the garage, deep into the black trees.
    In relating what follows I must confess to a certain chronological vagueness. The events themselves I can see in sharp focus, and I want to think they happened that same evening, and there are good reasons to suppose they did. In a narrative sense they present a nice neat package, effect dutifully tripping along at the heels of cause. Perhaps it is the attraction of such simplicity that makes me suspicious; that along with the conviction that real life seldom works this way.
    The events which follow may have been the culmination of many meals eaten in the Littler kitchen, the four of us cramped into the nook where their dinette was stationed, walled in onthree sides. Eileen herself always insisted on the seat at the free end so she could get up and grab the coffee pot or pour drinks. Drew, my father, and I would all be penned in once the meal began, unable to push our chairs back more than an inch or two. I think I was the only one who felt the terrible restriction, since Drew had no intention of getting up as long as he had his mother to fetch for him. My father seemed to enjoy tight places, always spurning the empty end of the counter at the Mohawk Grill in favor of the end jammed with people and stacks of dirty dishes.
    Once we were seated around Eileen’s table it was impossible to stand up without pushing the table forward and pinioning whoever was opposite against the wall, and I think Eileen took solace from the fact that if she could just get my father and her son seated they could rise in anger only with supreme difficulty. Nobody needed worry about me rising in anger, but I couldn’t have, regardless. Being the smallest by several degrees I got the narrowest seat, opposite Eileen herself, hemmed in by a wall behind, my father and Drew on either side, the table in front. I always relieved myself before dinner began.
    The little dinette itself was always crowded beyond belief. Condiments that did not require refrigeration were always left in the center of the table and these were joined, half an hour before mealtime, by cold jars of every description. Drew devoured pickles—sweet, dill, bread and butter, kosher—while my father ate olives—green ones, bulbous purples, shriveled blacks. Their tall, slender jars he would probe thoughtfully with his black forefinger, extracting the fruit expertly, even from the bottom of the tallest jars without the aid of a utensil. To this day, I cannot contemplate an olive, even when attractively displayed, say, on a silver relish dish, without seeing my father’s finger worming around the jar in search of the last elusive marble afloat in its own murky juices. Drew was equally disgusting in his personal search for pickles, which I too was inordinately fond of. But unless I could spear the first slice out of a fresh jar, before the contents became polluted, I abstained.
    I freely confess that my fastidiousness about the condiment jars was unwarranted. I was myself a grubby boy who had to be reminded about washing my hands before coming to the table, and it was my father who reminded me. I had been far cleaner when I had lived with my mother and eaten at the long table of the old Monsignor, but since coming to live with my father I had backslidbadly in the area of personal hygiene. Since I ate alone much of the time, or with people it was pretty hard to offend at the Mohawk Grill, I had become a social liability. In our apartment I had indulged many bad habits that my