The Risk Pool Read Online Free PDF Page B

been almost asleep, until the fart. “Man-color,” I said, wide awake again.
    “There you go,” he said.
    I woke with the sun in my eyes next morning. There were no curtains on the cabin’s high windows. I was still dressed from the night before. My legs, all scratched from the long walk through the woods, felt heavy and a little unsteady when I stood up. I looked around for a bathroom, but there wasn’t any.
    My father and his friend Wussy were face down on the other two bunks. My father’s arms were coffee-colored, like Wussy’s, but his legs and back were fish-white. Wussy had taken the trouble to crawl under the covers, but my father lay on top. The cabin had been warm the night before, but it was chilly now, though my father didn’t seem aware of it. I was cold, and it made me really wish there was a bathroom. In the center of the small table was an empty bottle and a deck of cards fanned face up. They’d kept score in long uneven columns labeled N and S on a brown paper bag. The S columns were the longer ones, and the number 85 was circled at the top of the bag with a dollar sign in front of it. I had awakened several times during the night when one of them yelled “Gin!” or “You son of a bitch!” but I was too exhausted to stay awake. I watched the two sleepers for a while, but neither man stirred, so I went outside.
    The iron skillet, alive with bright green flies, still sat on the grate. There were so many flies, and they were so furious that their bodies pinged against the metal like small pebbles. They would buzz frantically in the hardened chili for a few seconds, then do wide arcs above the skillet before diving back again. I watched with interest for a while and then went down to the river. We were so far upstream that it wasn’t very deep in most spots, a river in name only. Rocks jutted up above the surface of the water and it looked like you’d be able to jump from one to the next all the way to the opposite bank. I tried it, but only got partway, because when you got out toward the middle, the rocks weren’t as close together as they’d looked from the bank. One solid-looking flat rock tipped under my weight and I had to plunge one sneakered foot deep into the cool current to keep from falling in. The water ran so fast that the shoe was nearly sucked off, and I was scared enough to head back to shore on asquishy sneaker, aware that if my mother had been there, she’d have thrown a fit about my getting it wet. I doubted my father and Wussy would even notice. I found a comfortable rock on the bank and had another look at my father’s knife gadget, trying to pretend I didn’t have to go to the bathroom. Having the river right there made the necessity to pee hard to ignore. I wasn’t sure I could hold it all day.
    After a while the door of the cabin opened and Wussy appeared in his undershorts. “Hello, Sam’s Kid,” he said. He tiptoed over to the spot where he’d built the fire, yanked himself out of his shorts and watered the bushes for a very long time. I could hear him above the sound of the river.
    When he saw me watching, he said, “Gotta go, Sam’s Kid?”
    I shook my head. I could hold out a while longer, and I wanted it to seem like my own idea when I went. I was very relieved to learn that peeing in the weeds was permissible, though it was one more thing I didn’t think I’d mention to my mother.
    “First thing every morning for me,” Wussy explained. “Can’t wait.”
    When he was finished, he went back inside for his pants and shoes. I went over to where he’d stood, as if it were an officially designated area, and released my agony.
    Wussy came out with the rods and his tackle box. “Better get our ass going and catch breakfast,” he said. “Your old man ain’t going to be no help. I see you got your shoe wet.”
    “Fell in,” I admitted, surprised that I had been wrong about him not being the type to notice.
    “River runs pretty quick out there in the