The Risk Pool

perhaps the fact that I wasn’t
too
bad-looking, or that, yes, it was true, I wasn’t as good-looking as my father.
    And in response to her beautiful smile, I bleated.
    I remember the horror of it even now. The sound I made resembled no word. It didn’t even sound human. My father blinked, probably in disbelief, and for long terrible seconds nobody said anything. I flushed so deeply that my skin burned.
    During that first year with my father, I often had the feeling of having disgraced myself, but the moment I bleated at Tria Ward, I knew that if I were to become a murderer, a traitor to my country, and an abject coward in the face of battle, I would never feel lower or more worthy of universal disdain than I felt at that moment, a prediction, I am happy to say, that has been borne out.
    Fortunately, my humiliation was of major significance to me alone. I eventually discovered something like my normal voice, and I think Tria Ward and I had something like a conversation. We must have, because I came away from it knowing that she presently went to school at St. Francis, though she had attended a private school in Schenectady before that, both of which circumstances explained why I had never seen her around. Like me, she was entering the eighth grade in the fall, and she said she was trying to talk her mother into letting her go to Mohawk High the following year, though she thought she’d probably end up at Bishop McGuin in Amsterdam, or maybe this school in Connecticut.
    I think we were both more than a little conscious of the adult conversation that was going on next to us. Listening in on adults was a habit I’d picked up very young, and I remember suspecting that Tria Ward was the same way, that she was eavesdropping on her father even more intently than I on mine, as if she hoped to learn the answer to some urgent question, one she’d have just asked if she hadn’t known she wasn’t supposed to.
    My father was still needling Jack Ward about leading the good life.
    “We both know what the good life is, Sam,” Jack Ward said, his voice low and confidential. “The good life is not being shot at. Money. The rest of it. All fine and dandy. But not waking up in the Hürtgen Forest, hemorrhoids all adangle, no feeling in your feet—that’s the good life.”
    “They didn’t kill us, anyway,” my father said.
    “No, but they tried like bloody hell, and I got awful tired of it.”
    “We were trying, too.”
    “Not me,” Jack Ward said. “I honestly couldn’t say for sure I killed anybody. I just ducked, got off a round or two, tried not to hit any of our guys, prayed like a schoolgirl. You never prayed, did you.”
    “Never once,” my father said.
    “You wouldn’t shit me,” Jack Ward said.
    “We all prayed,” Mike said.
    “Never once,” my father insisted.
    Jack Ward smiled. “I never stopped till we passed Staten Island.”
    “You stopped then though, I bet.”
    “I did,” he admitted. “I made about a hundred deals with God over there and never honored one.”
    My father shrugged. “If he’s half as smart as the preachers say, he knew you wouldn’t.”
    “We never shook on them, is the way I look at it.”
    Mike was looking pale and nervous, as if he expected lightning. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” he said. “Don’t let Irma hear you.”
    “I got God covered anyhow,” Jack Ward said. “This one claims she’s going to be a nun, and her mother’s practically one already. I get prayed for all the time.”
    “For all the good it does,” Mike observed.
    That reminded my father of a joke, which he told at excruciating length. It was about a guy who was constipated and went to half a dozen doctors. Nobody could help. Finally, the last doctor prescribed a powerful enema, which the man took home with him, but he was back the next day complaining of even greater discomfort. When the doctor expressed surprise that the enema had had no effect, the patient snorted, saying he might as well have shoved them up his ass for all the good they did. In place of the word “ass,” my father substituted a humming sound, turning his back on Tria and me for the finale. I already knew the punch line (it was one of the eight or ten jokes my father told regularly) and so I watched for Tria’s Ward’s reaction to it, expecting disgust. Instead, her expression registered something like fear, as if somebody had once warned her that the world was a foul, vulgar place, though this was the