The Risk Pool

that same funny thing it had done that afternoon he leaned across the front seat of the car and threw open the passenger-side door.
    In the yard behind our house was a maple that had been planted by my grandfather before the war. It was a small boy’s dream. I lived to climb it. Its trunk was too thick to shinny up, but a makeshift ladder of two-by-four chunks had been nailed into it, and these brought the climber as far as the crotch, about six feet up, where the tree divided, unequally, the dwarf side rising about halfway up the house, the healthy dominant side to a much higher altitude.
    I was forbidden to climb the tree after the day my mother came out onto the back porch, called my name, and my voice drifted down to her from second story level, at the very top of the tree’s dwarf side. I swung down from branch to branch to show off my dexterity. My mother wasn’t impressed. “If I ever catch you in that tree again …” she said. She either liked unfinished sentences or couldn’t think of how to finish them, and I resented her unwillingness to spell out consequences. It was impossible to weigh alternatives without them. But I was an obedient boy and did as I was told whenever she was around.
    After school got out at 3:30, my mother’s cousin—Aunt Rose, Icalled her—looked after me until quarter of five when my mother got home from the phone company. Aunt Rose’s little house was around the corner and up the street from where we lived, halfway between my school and home. She fed me macaroons and we laughed immoderately at Popeye the Sailor. Aunt Rose also liked professional wrestling on Saturday afternoons, though her face got red with moral indignation at what some of the contestants got away with and how blind the referees were. Weekdays, after Olive Oyl was rescued, I headed home to await my mother on the front porch. Ours was probably the only house in Mohawk that was always locked. The only one that needed to be, my mother said. I knew why, though I wasn’t supposed to. It was to keep my father out.
    The fifteen minutes between 4:30 and 4:45 was my time in the tree. Each day I dared a little higher, the slender upper branches bending beneath my seven-year-old weight. I was convinced that if I could make it to the top of the tree, I would be able to look out over the roof of my grandfather’s house, beyond Third Avenue, across all of Mohawk. I quickly mastered the dwarf side, but I was afraid to try the other. The branch I needed in order to begin was just beyond my reach, even when I stood on tiptoe in the crotch below. Although no great leap was necessary, my knees always got weak and I was afraid. If I failed to grab hold of the limb, I would fall all the way to the ground.
    Day after day I stood sorrowfully in the crotch, staring into the center of the tree, immobile, full of self-hate and terrible yearning, until my mental clock informed me that my mother’s ride would deposit her on the terrace any minute. The ground felt soft as a pillow when I swung down, and I knew I was a coward.
    One afternoon, as I stood there, gazing up into that dark green and speckled blue height, I was suddenly aware that I was being watched, and when I turned, he stood there on the back porch, leaning forward with his arms on the railing. I could tell he’d been there for some time, and I was even more ashamed than other days when there were no witnesses. I knew when I saw him standing there that I had never intended to jump.
    “Well?” he said.
    And that one word was all it took. I don’t remember jumping. Suddenly, I just had a hold of the limb with both hands, then had a knee over, then with a heave, I was up. The rest of the waywould be easy, I knew, and I didn’t care about it. I could do it any day.
    “You better come down,” my father said. “Your mother catches you up there, she’ll skin us both.”
    Even as he spoke, we heard a car pull up out front. I swung down lickety-split.
    “You figure you can keep a secret?” he said.
    When I said sure, he nimbly vaulted the porch railing and landed next to me, so close we could have touched. Then he was gone.

3
    A week later he kidnapped me.
    I had left Aunt Rose’s and was on my way home when I saw the white convertible. It was coming toward me up the other side of the street, traveling fast. I didn’t think it would stop, but it did. At the last moment it swerved across the street to my side and came to a rocking halt, one wheel over the