The Risk Pool

feeble.
    “Look at my beautiful car!” the woman cried, as if noticing its condition for the first time. “Can’t somebody just make him stop?”
    My father and Eileen were talking to a tall trooper, while two others, their backs to Drew Littler, seemed to have been orderedto prevent anyone from approaching the boy until he’d spent himself.
    Near where I stood, a big red-haired man, full of momentary self-importance, was giving an eyewitness account of the accident, so I moved closer to listen.
    “At big kid aire … he come down from up aire” (pointing to the winding road that led to the Ward house) “goan like I never see. Like he forgot the highway was aire, till the last second. He sorta wakes up then and seen where he wuz, and then you know what that kid done?”
    Everybody wanted to know.
    “He just raised hisself up and steps off that murtercycle like he was parked along of the curb, and off that sonofagun went without him. Went over on its side, then bounced right back up like it was rid by a ghost, hit that aire blue car in the door and stuck like a arrow. That aire blue car went right up sideways on its wheels and flung that murtercycle off into the weeds up aire where ’at crazyboy’s beatin’ on her now. You never see nothin’ like it for weird.”
    There was a murmur of appreciation among the red-haired man’s listeners, but the man wasn’t finished.
    “And that aire crazyboy … summer-saultering along the road after that murtercycle like he can’t wait to catch up, screaming at it all the time. You never see nothin’ like it. Never even stopped to look at hisself afore he tuck off after that murtercycle to kill it. Beat on it with his hands until he come across ’em handlebars, yelling ‘I’m gonna kill the sonofabitch.’ Like ’at murtercycle was a person. He’s a crazyboy is what he is.”
    Down in the ditch the tall trooper talking to Eileen shrugged and my father started up the weedy bank. Drew looked over his shoulder once, then went back to beating the cycle with renewed purpose. I couldn’t watch.
    When I looked away, I saw Tria Ward standing on the other side of the road with a small woman an inch shorter than she. The girl had the same frightened expression she’d worn that afternoon at The Elms when we’d eavesdropped on our fathers’ conversation. She looked like she was straining to hear now, though I couldn’t imagine why. I looked around for Jack Ward, but I didn’t see him anywhere. The small woman with her looked to be in her fifties, but she was mummified, somehow, her skin shrunken tight over her tiny bones, like parchment. The spooky part was that she looked enough like Tria Ward for me to be sure that she was thegirl’s mother, this despite the fact that Tria seemed, just then, to be even more beautiful than I remembered her, her long dark hair lush, a wonderful contrast to her pale white, almost translucent skin. When she saw me, I flushed, half hoping she wouldn’t recognize me, half praying she would.
    She smiled immediately, though somewhat fearfully, as if I was just the sort of person she expected to find in the middle of such a terrible scene. And, because of this, I felt the same insane urge I’d felt when we had been introduced in the restaurant—to apologize. For what, I couldn’t imagine. Her mother noticed me then and looked up at her daughter, then back at me, suspiciously, I thought, as if validating my need to apologize.
    “Hi,” Tria Ward mouthed, a silent, lovely syllable that gave me sufficient courage to join them. “Isn’t it terrible?” she said when I arrived. Traffic was now halted in both directions.
    This time I managed something better than a bleat, something to the effect that, yes, it certainly
was
terrible, though I wasn’t sure precisely what she was referring to—the wrecked Impala, the woman with the sliced forehead, the bloodied specter of Drew Littler, his awful yelping as he bludgeoned the bike, or the fact that so many people were gathered around in ghoulish enjoyment, hoping the show wouldn’t end just yet. I figured she meant all of the above.
    “Do you
know
him?” Tria Ward said, as if she suspected I must.
    “No,” I said, fearful of guilt by association. But my answer was a split second off in its timing, slowed, somewhat surprisingly, by real guilt. “My father does,” I added, and a fresh tide of guilt washed in. I hadn’t meant to implicate him, but it did seem wise to explain his