The Risk Pool Read Online Free PDF

is he, bud?” my father poked me in the back.
    I was embarrassed. My mother had told me about Negroes and that it wasn’t nice to accuse them of it. Wussy’s skin was the color of coffee, at least the way my mother drank it, with cream and sugar. “I don’t know,” I said.
    “That’s all right,” my father said. “He’s none too sure either.”
    And then suddenly we were out of the trees and there was the cabin, the river gurgling about forty yards down the slope.
    Wussy tossed all the gear inside and started a fire in a circle of rocks a few feet from the ramshackle porch. When it got going good, he brought out a big iron grate to put over it. With the sun down, it had gotten cool and the fire felt good. My father fidgeted nearby until Wussy told him he could collect some dry sticks if he felt like it. “You could have brought a pair of long pants and a jacket for him at least,” he said.
    “Didn’t have a chance,” my father said.
    “Look at him,” Wussy said critically. “Knees all scraped up …”
    “How the hell did I know we were going to blaze a trail?” my father said. “You cold?”
    “No,” I lied.
    Wussy snorted. “I think I saw blankets inside.”
    My father went to fetch them. “Your old man’s a rockhead,” Wussy observed again. “Otherwise, he’s all right.”
    He didn’t seem to need me to agree, so I didn’t say anything. He opened three cans of chili with beans into a black skillet and set it on top of the grate. Then he chopped up two yellow onions and added them. You couldn’t see much except the dark woods and the outline of the cabin. We heard my father banging into things and cursing inside. After a few minutes the chili began to form craters which swelled, then exploded. “Man-color,” Wussy said. “That’s what I am.”
    My father finally came back with a couple rough blankets. He draped one over me and threw the other around his own shoulders.
    “No thanks,” Wussy said. “I don’t need one.”
    “Good,” my father said.
    “And you don’t need any of this chili,” Wussy said, winking at me. “Me and you will have to eat it all, Sam’s Kid.”
    My father squatted down and inspected the sputtering chili. “I hate like hell to tell you what it looks like.”
    It looked all right to me and it smelled better than I knew food could smell. It was way past my normal dinner time and I was hungry. Wussy ladled a good big portion onto a plate and handed it to me. Then he loaded about twice as much onto a plate for himself.
    “What the hell,” my father said.
    “What the hell is right,” Wussy said. “What the hell, eh Sam’s Kid?”
    My father got up and went back into the cabin for another blanket. When he returned, Wussy said no thanks, he was doing fine, but didn’t my father want any chili? “You better get going,” he advised. “Me and the kid are ready for seconds.”
    We weren’t, exactly, but when he finished giving my father a pretty small portion, he ladled more onto my plate and the rest of the skillet onto his own.
    “I bet there’s a lot of shallow graves out here in the woods,” my father speculated, pretending not to notice there was no more chili whether he hurried up or not. “You suppose anybody would miss you if you didn’t come home tomorrow?”
    “Women, mostly,” Wussy said. “I feel pretty safe though. Mostly I worry about you. Anything happened to me, you’d starve before you ever located that worthless oil guzzler of yours.”
    “Your ass.”
    When I couldn’t eat any more, I gave the rest of my chili to my father, who looked like he was thinking of licking the hot skillet. “The kid’s all right,” Wussy said. “I don’t care
who
his old man is.”
    It was so black out now that we couldn’t even see the cabin, just a thousand stars and each other’s faces in the dying fire.
    Wussy blew the loudest fart I’d ever heard. “What color’s my skin?” he said, as if he hadn’t done anything at all.
    I had