The Risk Pool

face his day at Our Lady of Sorrows, where he continued to plant and tend floral crosses under the watchful eye of the old Monsignor, who was dying even more surely now than before, though no more rapidly. Mrs. Ambrosino still adamantly refused to allow Skinny inside the rectory, and he now looked upon those old days when we’d worked together as a golden age, and would grow quite nostalgic over their memory, having forgotten completely his deep resentment at my being accepted into the inner sanctum. Or maybe it was that he had forgiven me, quietly confident that I was unlikely to be accepted there any longer.
    I had the long summer afternoons to myself. The library, the Accounting Department, and the Mohawk Grill were all too hot, so I usually spent the afternoon exploring on my bicycle. I biked everywhere—up to the Sacandaga Reservoir beaches, public and private, as well as to the marina, where I would stroll around like I owned the place, evaluating the speed boats and bikini-clad girls who greased themselves and lay on boat decks under the hot sun, oblivious to it and to my own hot orbs; free now of maternal restraints, I rode down to the Mohawk River, which rolled lazily east toward the Hudson, full of slow, murky sludge, a dead river back then, its banks encrusted with discarded cellophane and rusty pop cans.
    I also explored the winding cart paths of the Mohawk Country Club, where the long rolling fairways, most of them, were broad, funnel-shaped and forgiving. Racing along the edge of the woods, I would occasionally jump a foursome of silver-haired women on some remote tee, flushing them almost into perpendicular flight, like aged quail left behind by the flock in the general migration to Florida. Yes, I was perfectly ubiquitous that summer, present everywhere I had no business, mildly annoying as a breach ofsecurity, without giving any particular offense, or at least sufficient offense to warrant mobilizing the authorities, whoever
they
might have been. It struck me even back then how ill-equipped the Money People, as Drew Littler called them, were to keep away intruders (admirers, in my case). The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending. At the country club, for instance, they could effectively keep interlopers off the first, ninth, tenth and eighteenth holes, but I owned the rest.
    My favorite afternoon haunt was still Myrtle Park, and most afternoons I would stop there on my way home. From the embankment overlooking the abandoned shack and mounds of discarded Mohawk trash, I would stare across the treetops to the blue-green hilltop a mile away on the other side of the highway where Tria Ward lived with her father, a man who had so much money he couldn’t spend it all, no matter how hard he tried, and who was still glad, after so many years, not to be shot at. I thought about Jack Ward a lot, and the way he had slipped Mike that fifty so smooth that nobody had noticed but me, and I compared him to my own father, who always carried what money he had deep in his front trouser pocket, an unorganized wad of mixed denominations from which he peeled bills to slap on the bar when he sat down. He always left the money right where it was when he went to the men’s room, its duty to carve out a small personal space there, establish beyond question his right to return.
    It seemed strange that he and Jack Ward had known each other as younger men, that they had awakened cold and wet in the same German forest, clutching machine guns, thinking about Mohawk and what their lives would be like in the unlikely event they made it home. Had they planned it all there in that dark forest? Had Jack Ward planned to marry the jewel house on the hill, the shiny Lincoln in the circular drive, the money he couldn’t spend? Had he planned to engender the dark-eyed, frightened-looking girl I wanted to teach how not to be afraid, a lesson I felt confident to convey, despite not having mastered it myself? And my own father. Had he planned things too? The long, bitter wars with my mother? The big, hollow third-floor Main Street apartment? The long days working on the road? A life where the principal diversions were endless parades to the post and daily number drawings? And what about me? He couldn’t have planned on me, I thought.
    Having awakened in the Hürtgen Forest remained a bond between the two men even now, something with the power to draw them together for five quick minutes in a dark bar