The Risk Pool

Florida. There was still some relative wealth on Kings Road and all along the east edge of the country club, and in the Jewish enclave near one entrance to Myrtle Park. Otherwise, houses that evidenced any genuine signs of material wealth were relatively scarce, and most of the once grand older homes had fallen into neglect, shrinking behind weed jungles and unpruned trees. But for Drew Littler you could qualify as one of the Money People if you had a picture window in the living room or a Doughboy pool in the backyard. It was from Drew that I learned the ultimate relativity of wealth—that wealthy people are those who have a dollar more than you do.
    How odd we must have looked, Drew Littler and I, cruising those neighborhoods we had no business in, slowing down on the quiet streets, looking the houses over with a cool appraiser’s eye, Drew pointing at them like a Beverly Hills tour bus director. Drew with his shaggy hair sticking out like straw beneath his Brando motorcycle hat, always wearing black, rhinestone-studded, impossibly pointed boots, dusty black jeans. And me, his little pilot fish and understudy, trying not to look like too much of a doofus. Up and down the streets of Mohawk we cruised, just the sort of people my mother would have been tempted to report to the police had she seen us slow down in front of her house, looking it all over, as if for means of nocturnal entry.
    But there was only one house we visited regularly. Up that long, winding drive through the woods we would climb until we burst out into the sunlight, the whole county stretched out below us, all the way to the black trees that bordered the river to the south. Then Drew would turn off the engine and dismount just outside the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the jewel-house property, and light a cigarette there, just looking, his face a dark contrast to its gleaming white facade. He never repeated what he’d said that first evening about the house being his someday, but I could see him thinking it and I’d remember my father’s nickname for him—Zero—and smile at his rippling back, as I too smoked under the cool trees.
    Sometimes, the man we’d seen that first evening would come out by the double garage, no doubt having seen us loitering, just outside his entryway, a mere hundred yards from his front door.I always expected to meet a police cruiser on our way back down the private road to the highway, but we never did.
    It was on one of these motorcycle excursions during the spring of 1960, that first year that I lived with my father, that we turned down Third Avenue and I saw the sign in front of our old empty house. I had not even been by since refurnishing the place with my plunder from Klein’s. The house looked different, smaller somehow, no doubt the result of my recent travels among the affluent, whose gabled Tudors and big split-level ranches had given me a new sense of the appropriate dimensions for a human dwelling. The house now seemed almost a miniature, as if people of normal height might be required to stoop in the doorways. Winter had taken its toll on the place too, and I’ve often wondered since how it is that the elements invariably do greater damage to houses that are not lived in than the inhabited houses on either side, as if granted some strange cosmic license for destruction. The house looked dingy and gray, its paint peeling badly under the eaves and beneath the arched peak. I couldn’t remember it ever looking so shabby before, and its sad condition, together with the For Sale sign on the lawn, combined to force a sudden, terrible realization—that my mother had died during the winter and no one had told me.
    “What’s the matter with you?” my father wanted to know when we returned. He and Drew were not feuding just then, my father having loaned him the money for new tires for the bike, but he still razzed Drew unmercifully, telling him, among other things, that if he ever had an accident with me aboard, he’d better just get back on the bike and keep riding, as far away from Mohawk as he could get.
    I said nothing was the matter.
    His eyes narrowed.
    “Don’t look at me,” Drew said, himself surprised when he looked over his shoulder at me and saw my dark expression. “I can’t be to blame for
every
fucking thing.”
    As soon as I’d seen the For Sale sign and realized what it meant, I’d concluded that my father must know. Maybe they all did. Eileen, surely. Drew, perhaps. Why