The Risk Pool

presence on the opposite embankment where he had now arrived at the twisted pile of metal and the bloody, still raving boy.
    Drew had turned to face my father when he got close, and they each stood their ground now, my father just outside the reach of the ragged metal handlebar. We couldn’t hear anything, but I saw my father gesture in the general direction of the crowd; Eileen remained with the troopers and ambulance attendants. Drew studied the gallery for a second, as if this were the first time he’d noticed he wasn’t alone, but did not seem particularly impressed with the assembled mass. When my father held out his hand, Drew cocked the handlebar in response. I saw one of the troopers unsnap the strap on his holster.
    Silence descended on the crowd. Even the red-haired man had interrupted his umpteenth account of the accident. The only sound was the faraway rumble of an approaching dump truck still two hundred yards up the highway.
    And then suddenly it was over. Drew Littler dropped the metal bar and went to his knees, my father catching him as he pitched forward. Quickly, the troopers and ambulance attendants were scrambling up the hill, and I saw Eileen sit down on the asphalt. “He’s a crazyboy is what he is,” I heard the red-haired man say. “Thinks that murtercycle is a person.”
    “The nut behind the wheel,” the big woman said, but the crowd had changed and the reference become elliptical. This time nobody laughed, and the big woman looked confused and hurt. She remembered how it was to be funny.

21
    Only when the ambulances disappeared around the curve heading back toward Mohawk did I realize I’d been forgotten. The attendants had rolled Drew onto a stretcher and struggled with his dead weight down the incline to the waiting ambulances. I thought they did a pretty good job, dropping him just the once, and then not very hard. Drew was about as big as the two attendants put together. They placed him in the second ambulance, which had just that minute pulled in behind the first. Eileen rode in the back with her son and an attendant, my father up front with the driver. The woman who’d been driving the Impala had the other ambulance all to herself.
    “Mother,” Tria Ward said, when the crowd began to disperse. “This is Ned Hall.”
    I don’t know what surprised me more—that Tria Ward remembered my name or that she thought me worthy of introducing to her mother. Introductions were not part of my father’s normalsocial routine. When we went someplace, he more or less assumed that people would know who we were, or if they didn’t, they ought to. When pressed on the subject, he’d admit that, yes, I was his, but there were a lot of people I knew pretty well who had no idea what my name was. Some others, like Wussy, got too much of a kick out of calling me Sam’s Kid to use my name anyway. Now, being introduced by my correct name to someone like Tria Ward’s mother had an odd effect on me. On the one hand it was flattering, like suddenly being granted personhood, but also a little unnerving, because I wasn’t certain I’d prove worthy. Would she divine after a few exchanges that I didn’t merit so specific an identity and ask her daughter, à la Mike at The Elms, what’s wrong with
him
?
    “Hall,” Mrs. Ward repeated. “That is a common name, but not a local one.”
    I did not know what to say to that. I had counted eleven Halls in the Mohawk directory once, but I felt this might be the wrong time to volunteer that information.
    “That looked rather like a young man I used to know,” she said, pointing across the highway to the empty embankment where my father and Drew Littler had stood, as if she could still see them there. “His name was Samuel Hall, I believe.”
    I admitted that someone named Samuel Hall was my father.
    “He has not aged particularly well, has he?” Mrs. Ward said, as if she imagined that I might confirm her opinion by comparing the way I saw him now with her recollection of him as a younger man. “Of course, people live hard lives, don’t they.”
    Clearly, from the tone of her voice, she counted herself among those who lived hard lives.
    “Perhaps your young friend would like something cool to drink, dear,” Mrs. Ward speculated, settling on a phrase midway between an indefinite pronoun and a specific identity. The traffic had resumed on the highway now, the cars on the shoulder inching back into the stream, an occasional horn blaring.
    There