The Risk Pool

willing to share the burden of my moroseness. When he told me we were going out to The Elms it all made sense. When Eileen got off work, the two of them were going to sit me down and break the news. There wouldn’t be any trip to Schenectady on Sunday. There wasn’t anyone to visit anymore.
    As soon as we were on the road he started doing all the stuff I wished he’d do before turning the key in the ignition. Found his cigarettes wedged down in the seat, located a match, lit up,turned on the radio full blast, each station shouting at us angrily for a split second before disappearing. Finally he settled on the original station, cuffed me in the back of the head, told me to smile, watched me and not the road until I did.
    In short, he was a menace. As usual. The old rusty Merc pulled naturally to the right, a tendency he always failed to notice or correct until we’d drifted within inches of a curb of parked cars. Then he’d swerve suddenly, dangerously, back out to the center line and sometimes beyond. Whenever he saw somebody he knew, he always stopped. Right where he was. Beneath a traffic light, blocking a busy driveway. On a bridge. On the sidewalk. The kind of behavior my mother had always called selfish. His idea was that if people couldn’t get around him they weren’t trying very hard.
    “That new?” he said, eyeing me.
    I said yes, it was a new shirt. In fact I’d swiped it from Klein’s the night before, the first thing I’d stolen since furnishing my mother’s now abandoned house.
    He nodded, glanced at the road to make sure it was still there, then went back to studying me. “You don’t have to spend your own money,” he said. “You need a shirt, you tell me you need a shirt. That’s all.”
    I told him I would in the future, but right now I just needed the one. I knew what he was up to. I was supposed to get the idea that I would be coming to him for things now. That I could.
    “You just say, I could use a shirt … right?” he shrugged. “That’s all. That’s not so tough.”
    I said fine. I would.
    “How come your mother’s on your mind all of a sudden?”
    “She’s not,” I said.
    “You wouldn’t shit a shitter …”
    I said I wouldn’t, but he knew I would, and did, and was. “I just feel like seeing her. It’s been a long time.”
    We were out in the country now, the sky darkening in the west. Dark trees flew by and I just watched them to keep from having to look at him.
    “Fine,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t buy you a shirt. I’m not your mother, but I can buy you a shirt.”
    Back to the shirt.
    “You need anything else?”
    I told him no. I hadn’t even really needed the shirt. I told him I couldn’t think of anything I needed.
    “Nothing?” he said.
    Nothing.
    The parking lot was packed and my father had to park over a tree stump. Eileen saw us when we came in and gave my father a thumbs down. The bar was crowded too, every stool at the horseshoe bar occupied, each of the small cocktail tables surrounded, the booths packed and virtually invisible in the thick cigarette smoke. One of my father’s real social skills, however, was carving out space in a crowded bar. Someone would pivot slightly and there he’d be, one elbow on the mahogany, clearing somebody’s highball glass out of the way with a sophisticated slight of hand, a twenty-dollar bill materializing in its place. Given this small opening he then managed somehow to look for all the world as if he’d been right in that spot since the building was erected. The illusion was so overpowering that those he displaced often apologized when they discovered him there.
    Mike and a new bartender were both pouring drinks, two-fisted, behind the bar, and it took the former a minute to gravitate to our end with about a dozen dirty glasses, which he bunched on the metal drainboard with another two or three dozen already sitting there.
    “So,” my father said. “What’s the story.”
    “Once upon a time there was a man who wished he was somewhere else,” Mike said. He had a quarter in his soapy hand, which he plunked in front of me for the jukebox, which was right behind the stool my father slipped onto when the woman who was there stood to search out the ladies’ room. There was already a song on, but only the thumping bass was audible above the noise in the bar.
    “One of my girls never showed,” Mike moaned.
    “Tough life,” my father said, surveying the room. “You bury