The Risk Pool

What, I continually wondered, could he want with us?
    As the summer progressed Drew Littler became more deeply moody and sullen, often not inviting me to ride on the back of his motorcycle on those evenings my father and I came over for dinner. Sometimes, he didn’t even want me spotting for him when he bench-pressed, once remarking that he was better off depending on himself. That hurt my feelings a little, but it was also a relief not to be around him when he was so morose.
    One sweltering evening toward the end of July, the phone rang just as Eileen and my father were finishing up the dinner dishes. Drew had roared down the drive a half hour earlier, and when she set the phone down, all the blood had drained from her face. She spoke through her wet fingers which had worked their way over her nose and mouth, prayer-fashion. “He’s done it,” she said. “He’s had an accident.”
    We all piled into the Mercury and my father backed it down the drive fast, scraping the rear bumper hard. When we came to the intersection, he started to turn left, toward the hospital, but Eileen said no, the trooper had told her the accident was out on the highway.
    My father was still for meeting the ambulance at the hospital, but Eileen was adamant and my father turned right for the highway.
    “Which way?” he said when we got to the stoplight at the intersection of Park and the highway. When Eileen realized she didn’t know, I heard myself say “Right” with such conviction that my father, who normally paid no attention to my opinion in such matters, did as he was told. The orange sun was down behind the dark trees which formed a corridor on both sides of the highway, peeking through in brief blinding flashes as we hurtled through the curves. It was the same time of day as when Drew had given me that first ride on the bike, and about a half mile from the entrance to the road that wound up toward Jack Ward’s house, I told my father to slow down. I’d hardly spoken when we came around a curve and saw the cluster of cars and people and flashing lights. Eileen was out of the car even before the convertible came to a halt.
    There were two police cars and an ambulance, but it was a middle-aged fellow in a red plaid hunting cap who was directing traffic around the flares that had been set up in the middle of the road. In the ditch across the highway a blue Impala sat, its rear door and hood caved in where the motorcycle had struck, its rearwheel collapsed in upon itself like a weak-ankled ice skater. Thirty feet up the embankment the mangled cycle had come to rest, an almost unrecognizable hunk of twisted black metal. Drew Littler stood over it, holding the detached handle bars in one hand. The fifty or so people who had gathered were staring at him, but no one was closer than twenty yards. Even from the other side of the road I could see that his jeans and t-shirt were covered with blood.
    My father followed Eileen across the highway. “You the mother?” I heard one of the troopers say to Eileen, who had slowed as she drew nearer her son, who was surrounded on three sides by police officers and ambulance attendants, all of whom were keeping their distance.
    Apparently Drew had been just catching his breath, because a moment after we arrived, he raised the twisted handlebars of the ruined bike over his head and began to pound the cycle, shouting something I couldn’t make out.
    “There he goes again,” I heard somebody say.
    Several people laughed nervously.
    “I never see anybody so mad at a dead motorcycle,” another commented, “have you?”
    “It wudn’t the motorcycle,” said a huge woman. “It was the nut behind the wheel.” Everybody thought this was funny too, though as an old automobile joke it worked imperfectly with respect to motorcycles.
    A middle-aged woman in a yellow dress, who had been sitting on the ground next to the blue Impala and sobbing, quietly got to her feet to watch Drew go at the bike. There was a ragged tear along her forehead and the white towel in her hand was splotchy red. Each time Drew wailed the motorcycle with the handlebars, she covered her ears, though the sound he was making wasn’t particularly loud now. “Can’t somebody make him stop!” the woman screamed. “Can’t somebody just make him stop?”
    Nobody looked all that anxious to, and they must have figured that from the look of Drew Littler he couldn’t keep it up much longer. Each blow was increasingly