The Risk Pool

According to my father, Tree still had the two biggest, ugliest women in Mohawk County on the line, and when I asked him if he was counting Irma, Mike’s wife, he said he was counting everybody. “You should see
Tree’s
wife,” my father said, but he wouldn’t go into detail. Less frequently, my old friend Wussy would amble in wearing the same formless fishing hat, alight with colorful, hand-tied flies, which he would detach and let me examine, especially if my father was around. He always made a big deal about not letting my father touch his tackle, claiming he couldn’t afford to waste hours tying a fly if all it was going to hook was Sam Hall’s ugly black thumb. Wussy must have done something besides fish, but I never knew what it was. During the spring and summer he sold trout he caught to the Holiday Inn out on the highway, along with one or two other local restaurants. Sometimes, if he had a good catch, he’d have a half a dozen smaller ones left over and give them to Harry, who’d grill them if you asked. “Five-fifty up at the Holiday,” Harry grumbled every time he served one of Wussy’s trout. For some reason Harry always viewed the Holiday Inn as his chief competition for the Mohawk restaurant dollar, and he could never see why people would spend the extra to go there. When they’d opened a year ago, he’d given them six months to go belly up. “Same friggin’ trout,” he insisted.
    “They got backs on the chairs there,” my father explained from his stool at the counter. “You can lean back without falling on your ass.”
    Harry snorted. “Give me the extra three bucks and I’ll stand behind you.”
    “I could never be sure you wouldn’t let me go right to the deck.”
    “That’s true,” Harry admitted.
    “You ever think your business might improve if you worked on your personality?” said a man named John, one of the regulars I didn’t like.
    “I do all right,” Harry barked. “I do all fuckin’ right.”
    “And you only work eighty hours a week,” John said.
    “What would I do in this fuckin’ town if I wasn’t working?” Harry wanted to know. “Go to the track. Chase married women. Fall off bar stools?”
    “There you go,” somebody said.
    “I wish somebody’d chase my wife,” John said. “I’d throw in a color TV if he caught her.”
    “What’s wrong with her?”
    “She’s a bum lay.”
    “I didn’t think so,” my father said.
    “Me either,” Wussy agreed.
    It got pretty quiet then. John stirred his coffee thoughtfully. Under normal circumstances he would not have felt compelled to defend his wife’s honor, but he wasn’t used to having her reputation assailed by a mulatto. “In Mississippi a guy could get lynched for talking that way,” he said.
    “This ain’t Mississippi?” Wussy said. “You coulda fooled me.”
    Wussy, I learned years later, had something of a reputation as a back door man, though I have no idea if he ever did anything to earn it. “Somebody’s gonna whack his big black dick off one of these days,” John said when Wussy was gone.
    “How do you know how big his dick is?” my father said. Everybody thought that was funny but John.
    Sometimes, early in the morning, Skinny Donovan would be pacing outside the diner in the gray predawn light waiting for Harry to open. I’d see him from my bedroom window in the Accounting Department. The sound of my father peeing with the door open before he left for work always woke me. That summer he was working in Albany, an hour’s drive, and he always eased his bladder last thing before leaving. I kept my watch by the side of the bed to time him, because peeing was one of my father’s amazing talents. For quite a while forty-two seconds was the record, forty-two honest seconds from the instant his stream first hit the water full force (he never used the side of the bowl), untilthe noise ceased. I never counted the incidental plinks that resulted from shaking. Then one heroic morning he suddenly shattered his previous mark with a startling 55-second pee. I thought at first that I must have calculated wrong, but that’s what it was and I stand by it. At various times in my life—in restaurant and airport rest rooms—I’ve unobtrusively timed perfect strangers and have concluded that my father in his day was the stuff of legend.
    I’d see Skinny always pacing in the deserted street below as if he had to do the same thing, but it was Harry’s strong black coffee he needed to