The Risk Pool

plunge into the conversation and a vague desire to demonstrate my own familiarity with things automotive.
    “A convertible automobile,” Mrs. Ward said, as if the concept required analysis. “I think, my dear, that headlights just might be the order of the day.”
    This was true, of course, it being very dark among the tall trees, but I immediately wished the old woman had not suggested it, seeing the startled effect that this complication had on Tria. In order to turn on the headlights, she would have to remove one hand from the wheel, something she was apparently loath to do. Had she glanced at the dash she would have been able to locate the lights in half a second, but taking her eyes off the road at our current breakneck speed was unthinkable. So she was reduced tofumbling for the lights with her left hand. To make matters worse, when her left hand came off the wheel, her right foot, for some reason, came off the accelerator, as if the two opposite limbs were controlled by the same invisible string. She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.
    “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.
    Suddenly, it was very quiet. The air-conditioning had gone off, and with it the radio, which had been playing softly. In their place we now had lights, and we all three watched the trees unaccountably climbing the hill before us. So were the ones out my side window. It was so quiet we could hear the sound of pebbles being ground beneath our wheels. We were adrift, backing down toward the highway at roughly the same speed we had climbed.
    With neither power steering nor brakes, the car was suddenly foreign to Tria. She tried everything she could think of, but nothing worked. She gave the Lincoln more gas, naturally, to no effect. The key in the ignition was frozen, the steering wheel locked, and her legs too short to press down hard on the brakes. With a look of pure terror, she turned to her mother and said something that surprised me more than anything that had happened so far—“I love you, Mother!” she said.
    Mrs. Ward turned to face her daughter with an expression that bespoke astonishment, fear, and sincerity in equal parts, as if both mother and daughter had been signaled unambiguously that the end of the world was near. “Why, I love you too, dear,” she said.
    We left the Lincoln right there, its rear end well off the pavement, its long front sticking way out onto the roadway. God, it was a big car.
    Tears tracked down Tria Ward’s cheeks as the three of us made our way up through the corridor of dark trees. She made no sound though. There was nothing wrong with the car, except that the engine was flooded from her attempts to accelerate up the hill after it had stalled.
    Unfortunately, my own driving skills were limited to what I had already done. You couldn’t very well be Sam Hall’s kid without knowing what to do about a rolling car. About once a month myfather would park on an incline, put the car in neutral, and get out to talk to somebody. If I happened to be in the car, I’d just lean over and throw it into park when it started to roll. If not, he’d usually catch up to the convertible before it got too far. We changed the convertible’s broken rear reflectors every few weeks and drove blithely away from the fender benders and cracked headlights of unlucky adjacent automobiles. So, when I saw that Jack Ward’s big white Lincoln was about to bear us back into the trees, I knew what to do.
    What I didn’t know was whether I was permitted to do it. I mean, I wasn’t driving, and it wasn’t my car, and I hardly knew these people. I could imagine Tria and her mother deeply resentful of my impertinence if I were to just ignore the chain of command by leaning across and slamming the Lincoln to a rocking halt without permission. And, too, there was something a little unnerving about the two of them turning to each other and professing their love at that precise moment, as if doing so might have some sort of incantatory effect on the vehicle. So I didn’t do anything until we got up a pretty decent head of silent steam and I heard the back wheels on the soft shoulder. By that time, putting the car in park had about the same effect as slamming into a tree, which we would have done in another three feet. For a