The Risk Pool

tiptoes, eyes all bugged out. When he didn’t wave back, she got suspicious. Old Lady Agajanian.”
    “There’s no Agajanian on Third Avenue,” said the man whose wife lived there.
    “Old Goddamn Lady Agajanian,” Skinny shouted, “you simple shit! On Third Avenue. Next to Claude Goddamn Schwartz.”
    “Besides,” somebody said. “Your wife lives on Second Avenue.”
    The man had to admit this was true. He’d forgot. His wife did live on Second Avenue.
    “I heard it was the kid,” my father said.
    “All right,” Skinny said. “You tell me how a kid’s gonna bend down the crossbeam on that ramada.”
    “I’m just telling you what I heard,” my father said, throwing up his hands. “Some kid named Clyde Schwartz tried to kill himself is what I heard. Sue me.”
    “I don’t want to sue you. But I’ll buy your dinner if you’re right.”
    “I didn’t know there was any Jews living on Third Avenue,” said the man whose wife didn’t live there either.
    “Hey,” my father shouted after me. “Where are you off to?”
    The hospital was right around the corner and up the hill, but I pedaled over to Third Avenue instead. The neighborhood was so quiet that I thought at first that the whole thing had to be a mistake. The Claudes’ house looked deserted and their station wagon wasn’t in the drive, but on the other hand there were no police cars, no neighbors clustered on porches, no indication of anything amiss. But instead of turning around and heading back I got off my bike and walked it up the drive. I was staring at the bent, mangled crossbeam and the tipped-over barbecue, when a voice behind me said, “I remember you. The friend.”
    There was an elderly woman standing in the shadows of her screened-in porch, her white face and hair close to the dark metal webbing. I’d seen her before, when I was a regular visitor at the Claudes. About the only thing I could remember about her was that in the middle of summer she always wore a fur coat when she came outside. She was looking past me at the bent, tilted ramada, as if she could still see the ghastly spectacle there, as if she might see nothing else for a long time. I felt sorry for her, because shewas pretty old and she shouldn’t have had to see Claude Jr. staring at her the rest of her days.
    That night my father and I stayed home and watched television. He didn’t try to make me talk, but I could feel him looking at me, frowning, puzzled, not that this was unusual. When he noticed me at all perplexity was the predictable result. Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any more, he cuffed me a good one.
    “What,” I said.
    “You ever try anything like that and I’ll kick your ass,” he said.
    I didn’t know whether the threat of an ass-kicking was much of a deterrent to anyone contemplating suicide, but I appreciated the thought. Mostly, he was still pissed at Skinny, who had refused to pay up when it was confirmed that it wasn’t the father who’d tried to croak himself. “You was just as wrong,” Skinny claimed. “
Clyde
Schwartz, you said. There’s no such goddamn person even.”

20
    About this same time, I joined a gang. Or rather, a commando strike force. Its other two members were its leader, Drew Littler, and a friend of his named Willie Heinz. Our purpose, according to Drew, was to right wrongs wherever we found them. Do what needed doing. Do what nobody else had the balls to do.
    I found this rhetoric, which Drew had borrowed from an old comic book, most appealing, especially in its unspecificity. It did not seem to me that we’d discover any of the world’s major wrongs here in Mohawk, but it was fun to imagine that evildoers contemplating nefarious activities would have to deal with us. We could count ourselves a deterrent, sort of like the magic powder that warded off elephants in the old joke. Basically, we roamed the streets at night in search of injustice. I was able to join the gang only when my father was out, but that was most of the time,what with poker games, trips to the harness track, and bars he sometimes couldn’t get past on the way home. Drew only bothered with the gang when his motorcycle was disabled, a day or two out of the average week. Then we’d meet out in back of the Littlers’ house sometime before sundown and head up into the park to train, where nobody would see our paramilitary drills and suspect our existence. Indeed, we spent an inordinate amount of time making sure there was no