The Risk Pool

first concrete evidence that it might be true. I felt very sorry for her, and if I could have thought of a way, I would have tried to convince her that the world was neither foul nor vulgar, the painful erection in my chinos notwithstanding.
    All that night I thought about Tria Ward. After her father took her away, into the dining room, my father and I left for a dinner of hamburg steaks at the Mohawk Grill, and there he finally got me to talk a little about my mother. What the hell, he said, he’d even sign F. William Peterson’s papers if I wanted him to. He just hated like hell to be taken for a ride, that’s all. Then he launched into a familiar diatribe about lawyers in general and F. William Peterson in particular, concluding that F. Willie was no prize, far from it, but he wasn’t as bad as most.
    As I listened to him talk and looked around the diner, which we had to ourselves this late on a Sunday evening, except for Harry and Wild Bill Gaffney, the town idiot, whom Harry looked after sometimes. Everything looked shabby, somehow. Shabbier than usual. And when Wild Bill used his index finger to scour the last drop of dirty coffee from the bottom of his cup, I wanted to cry.I was sensible enough to be embarrassed about feeling this way, for here I was, warm and decently dressed, with a plate full of fries dripping brown gravy in front of me, with over three hundred dollars in the bank that nobody knew anything about. My mother was not dead, as I had imagined twenty-four hours earlier, and for all I knew she might even draw her mind back out of the dark woods that attracted her and come home. In general, things were looking up, but for some reason I’d never felt lower, and when my father said he thought maybe he’d go out for a while, I was glad to have the rest of the night to myself.
    We ambled across the deserted Main Street, hands in our pockets, and up the stairs to our dark flat. I got undressed right away and pretended to read, so my father wouldn’t stay around the apartment any longer than he wanted to, about five minutes, as it turned out. Then he was gone, the convertible jerking away from the curb below, back toward The Elms to torment Irma and wait for Eileen to get off work. Harry came out of the diner below, Wild Bill shuffling behind him, and locked the front door, officially surrendering downtown Mohawk to ghosts. The Mohawk Theater, three doors down from the grill, had closed after Christmas, its dark marquee still insisting IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, A CLASSIC . The theater was the fourth business on Main to fail that year, though two of the others had reopened on the new highway that skirted town. Looming up behind Main Street was the dark top floor of the junior high, and behind it the yellow windows of the hospital perched atop the treacherous Hospital Hill. Beyond it, the vast expanse of Myrtle Park, its unlit winding trails too spooky to visit at night. I’d read about a place in Arizona called the Superstition Mountains where people had a habit of disappearing without a trace, and it occurred to me that you could disappear without a trace right here in Mohawk and that I probably would, eventually.
    On the other side of the park and the new highway, out beyond the city limits, was Tria Ward, and I thought about her and the scared look on her face when my father told the joke about the constipated man. Had her father recognized me as one of the boys who sat on the motorcycle at the end of his drive? Probably not. Probably it didn’t matter. The Wards were all safe inside the white jewel house. Safe from the lunatic Drew Littlers of Mohawk County, safe from boys like me who might be tempted to fall in love with their dark-eyed, convent-bound girl child.
    Somewhere in the gray consciousness of half sleep, though, my mind skittered away from beautiful Tria Ward and resolved a riddle that had been in the back of my mind all day. At the nursing home, I’d been asked to sign a big visitor’s ledger. There had been a page for each resident, and I had expected my mother’s to be clean. Instead, one illegible scrawl was entered there again and again, at least fifteen or twenty times. I had given it little thought, because it looked like the kind of scratching a doctor might be guilty of. Who else was there?
    When I started awake, though, that signature seemed written in the air above my bed, and before the scrawl could disappear I was able to decipher it: F. William Peterson, it