The Risk Pool

attractive, and that day we’d all seen Drew at his worst, raging out of control, bent on destruction, even self-destruction. But most times he was not a bad sort, and he wasn’t nearly as dumb as my father and his teachers down through the years had concluded.
    He had, in fact, something rather like a personal philosophy of life, and unless I am mistaken, I am the only person he ever discussed it with, including his mother. In fact, he recruited me, along with another dubious fellow named Willie Heinz, to become members of an organization to implement his philosophy, an organization whose membership never did exceed three, though we had great hopes of expanding into a worldwide network. The only goal of our organization was to abuse rich people, all of whom Drew Littler hated with a white-hot passion. The “Money People” he called them, the people who thought they were too good, who considered themselves above the rest. According to Drew, who explained all this one afternoon as I spotted for him in the garage, it was the fault of the people who had money that those who hadn’t any lived difficult lives, a notion he considered original to himself. Though five years older than I, Drew was only two grades ahead of me just then, having been held back, once due to a prolonged childhood illness, the other two times as the result of academic failure. When he turned eighteen that May, he intended to drop out and go to work in a garage that serviced motorcycles.
    Trust me when I say he had neither read nor heard of Karl Marx. In fact, my guess is that nobody in Mohawk had actually read him, and in my later studies at Mohawk High, which I attended to sporadically, I can recall no more than a passing derogatory reference to Marx in social studies class. It was many years later, after I had taken a degree at the university and was thinkingabout Drew Littler, which I often did and still do, that it occurred to me that he was a Marxist au naturel, perhaps the only one ever produced in the entire county.
    His brand of Marxism was simple and in several respects unorthodox. He never, at least in my hearing, extolled the worker. In fact, he was openly contemptuous of people like his mother, who worked for wages, for the simple reason that the work didn’t seem to get them much of anywhere, and he intended to work only until he could get enough money to take his bike onto the open road. In the meantime he meant to wage war on those who had enough money to look askance at those who didn’t. People had been looking askance at him for as long as he could remember, and he thought it was about time to put a stop to that. To this end he had a plan.
    The first part of the plan was to lift weights, because he had observed that since his taking on physical dimension fewer people looked askance at him, at least while he was looking at them. And, too, I think he held great abstract admiration for physical strength. I could tell that when he lifted, the iron bar became a metaphor—that it represented something to him, a problem, a dilemma. When he shoved the bar up and away from him, he won a personal victory over whatever obstacle it represented, and when the bar defeated him, he took that defeat blackly, morosely, personally. It deflated him instantly, just as my father had when he slammed the boy’s wrist to the table.
    When Drew Littler first started giving me rides on the back of his motorcycle, we’d cruise the neighborhoods where the Money People lived, and it was surprising how thorough was his information on who lived where. When we leaned into the turn onto some tree-lined street, he’d slow so his voice could be heard above the roar of the engine, and he’d tell me who lived in the better homes and whether they were doctors or lawyers or just rich. It troubled him when he did not know or could not remember who lived in a particularly well-groomed house set back from the street, a late-model car in the drive. Then he looked for all the world like a kid who’s studied hard for a test, devised an elaborate way to recall disparate facts, then forgotten the key association. It’s a terrible thing to have a long list of enemies.
    The most amusing part of all this—at least it’s amusing now—is that there were so few people in Mohawk with any real money. Since the tanneries had begun closing down, the county had gottenprogressively poorer, and most of the men who had made their money in leather had taken it with them to