The Risk Pool

breach in our security. Drew was particularly worried about Willie Heinz, who was not very bright and who lived for our commando raids. In fact, Drew so completely distrusted Willie’s ability to keep a secret that he refused to give our gang a name for fear that Willie would spill the beans bragging about us.
    Once up in the woods we’d do calisthenics and practice the chain of command, which required that Willie Heinz do, without question, whatever Drew told him, and that I do whatever Willie told me. This arrangement was entirely satisfactory, since Willie never could think of anything to tell me to do. Drew himself was every inch a soldier. He wore thin t-shirts that had their short sleeves torn away so that his huge shoulder muscles were visible when we worked out. Willie Heinz and I had a tough time concealing our admiration for his big, tan torso and rippling biceps. He was exactly the sort of fellow to inspire confidence in his troops, and I was only occasionally discomfited to recall that my father had slammed one of his huge arms onto the dinner table with such force that the boy’s feet had gone straight into the air.
    I think Willie Heinz was even more envious of Drew Littler’s musculature than I, probably because Willie was tall, with a sprinter’s build that shamed him when he wasn’t in full flight. That, however, is what I will always associate Willie Heinz with: flight. He was the most unabashed coward I ever met, so cowardly, in fact, that his cowardice was impossible to hold against him, since you knew in advance what to expect. Running away with Willie always reduced the most serious of situations to comedy. His long, loping strides and churning elbows always seemed a preface to literal flight. You expected him to be airborne momentarily, and when he remained grounded he resembled nothing so much as a badly designed bird.
    Strangely, it was Willie Heinz who usually made flight necessary, and I’ve since come to the conclusion that he simply delighted in the sensation of fear. No night of roving the streets ofMohawk was ever complete until Willie Heinz had put an impressive mound of dogshit on someone’s porch and rung the doorbell. His terrorist attacks often came as a surprise even to Drew and me. We’d be walking peacefully down the middle of the street and without warning Willie would become possessed. “Arghh …” he would begin to moan, barely audibly at first, but rapidly getting louder. Then he’d pretend that something invisible had grabbed him by the elbow and was dragging him off toward somebody’s dark porch. If we knew what was good for us, we hightailed it. I’d get a good lead, but within a block or so Willie, his fists flashing high in the air, would blow by me, shouting, “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker,” about one motherfucker per stride.
    Such behavior always embarrassed Drew, who hated, I suspect, to see our high purpose trivialized by mere pranks and silly minor vandalism. He not only hated to run, he refused to. Nobody who got a good look at Drew ever wanted to chase him. Even when the police pursued us, it didn’t rattle our leader, who knew all the Mohawk cops and made small talk with them when they pulled over to the curb where he was strolling, alone by then, Willie Heinz and I having beaten a hasty retreat. Sometimes he sent them off in the opposite direction looking for us, once nearly causing our capture after we’d cut across lots and doubled back toward home, a maneuver much favored by Willie Heinz, who considered it the height of deception and who hated to run more than a block or two in a direction other than the one he ultimately intended to pursue.
    These were exciting times, but I worried about Drew Littler, who seemed never to derive much enjoyment out of our sneak attacks, even though our targets were invariably those who qualified as “Money People.” Often he seemed abstracted, vaguely annoyed with us for being younger, though Willie was only a year Drew’s junior. His opinion of Willie and me was none too high, and I knew he doubted he’d be able to count on us in a pinch. What troubled me most was that I could sense a pinch on the not-too-distant horizon. He had something in mind for us, some reason for hanging out with us, captaining our band. I watched him carefully when he thought I wasn’t looking, watched the purple worm tunneling beneath the skin of his forehead when he became immersed in thought.