by Ian Rogers

Eddie came to see me on a Friday afternoon. I turned around and there he was. I didn't know how long he'd been there; it could've been only a second or it could've been five minutes. Eddie liked to hover. I told him once that he would have made a great stalker.

"Your services are required, bwana," Eddie said in a low, sly voice.

"What is it, Eddie?"

"I need you to start a pool," he said.

"Eddie, the players are on strike. There's no hockey."

"Not a hockey pool, Mikey. I want to start one for the Kid. A Kid pool."

"A Kid pool?"

Eddie nodded and licked his lips. "Can you set it up?"

"I don't understand."

He peeked over the wall into the cubicle next to mine, then leaned forward and whispered, "I've already asked around and a lot of people are down with it." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Mary-Beth, Weezy, Chase in Duplication, that old guy Nester who works on the loading docks."

"Down with what?" I felt completely lost, which was not entirely unusual while in Eddie's cologne-soaked presence.

He responded by dropping his hand on my shoulder and fixing me with a look that said he was going to be patient although I deserved no such thing. "I want you to use that mathematical brain of yours to set up a betting pool on Dora's Kid. We're going to place bets on the next time he gets busted by the cops. Winner gets double if they also guess the crime he gets busted for."

"That's pretty sick," I said. "You want to turn some sixteen-year-old's criminal exploits into a game?"

"No hockey," Eddie intoned, as if that explained everything (and in Eddie's defence, it probably did). "He's never going to find out, so where's the harm?"

"What if Dora finds out?"

"How would she?" Eddie leaned in again, and I got another whiff of Brut or Old Spice or whatever scent was on sale that week. "Listen, Mike, Dora's a lamb, I love her to pieces, but she ain't the brightest bulb in the deck, if you know what I'm saying." I did, despite his misused metaphors. "She couldn't find her ass with both hands and a GPS locator."

"If you're going to have a pool, you'll need regular updates. How do you propose to do that without making her suspicious?"

"Shit, Mike, she tells everybody what's going on with the little punk. If we take the initiative and ask about him ourselves, she'll just think we're being sympathetic."

The idea of using sympathy to hedge one's bets didn't come unnaturally to Eddie. Not to a guy who had climbed the corporate ladder, through his own colourful admission, by slamming his feet on the fingers of those directly beneath him.

Not that any of us were saints when it came to the Kid. We circled around Dora like sharks, waiting for her to dish out the chum. I was as guilty as anyone. Stories about the Kid were great theatre around the office.

If anyone knew his real name, they didn't use it. He had always been known simply as the Kid. As in, Didja hear? The Kid was picked up at school yesterday. They found a hunting knife in his jacket. Dora said the police probably planted it on him.

Stories about the Kid always ended with Dora's final commentary on how the entire situation was either a) a mistake, or b) a misunderstanding. Just lately she had become convinced that the police were persecuting the Kid as part of some nebulous plot, the purpose of which was vague at best.

It didn't matter anyway. The story was always the same. The Kid got picked up by the cops, and Dora was there to back him up. Only the details changed. Out of all the times he had been bust, the Kid had been charged only five times: twice for breaking and entering (a convenience store and his high school); once for assault (a bus-driver); once for possession of a controlled substance (hashish); and once for arson (an empty trailer near his house).

New people in the office hearing about the Kid for the first time invariably thought he was Dora's kid, but he was actually her grandson. Dora wasn't very old--not old enough to have grandkids, you'd think--but the fact was she had given birth to her daughter when she was fifteen years old, and her daughter, perhaps carrying on the family tradition, fired out her own kid when she was fifteen.

Dora liked to joke that she was third-generation trailer-trash and she had the trailer to prove it. I was raised in a doublewide Airstream by a doublewide mamma, she'd say in the slow, tired delivery of one who has told the same joke so many times it has lost whatever humour it once had. She was so big she couldn't turn around in the hallway; she'd have to back up like a dump-truck, except without the warning beeps.

Trailer-trash or not, she took care of the Kid. The duty had fallen to her after the Kid's mother was declared persona non grata by the court. This after the police pulled her over in a car (stolen) full of stereo equipment (ditto). The powers that be decided she and the Kid might be better off if they co-existed separately. Dora became the Kid's de facto mother, the one who went with him to court hearings and stood up when the judge asked if the Kid's legal guardian was present.

The Kid's adventures continued while he was in Dora's care, because he was only seventeen and was thus far immune to any real punishment the police could mete out, and because Dora's unwavering insistence that the Kid was an innocent. Things would undoubtedly change when the Kid turned eighteen and suddenly found himself in a whole new world.

The Kid'll like jail, Eddie opined one time in the cafeteria. It's like college. But with more sodomy.

Geez, Eddie, Louise had replied, putting down her sandwich. What college did you go to?

"So can you set it up?" Eddie asked. "His loss is our gain. Or someone's gain." He grinned wolfishly.

"Yeah, sure," I said, mostly to get rid of him. "Get back to me on Monday."

* * *

There were five of us in the pool at the beginning, but that number ballooned over the following months. Everyone involved was familiar with the Kid's exploits and none of us seemed to be concerned with the moral dilemma of using his ever-growing criminal record as a substitute for Hockey Night in Canada. Maybe it was because we had never met him, hadn't even seen a picture of him on Dora's desk.

I organized the betting into two-week blocks that everyone could track on the calendar Eddie had given to me to hang in my cubicle. It featured the covers of pulp-fiction novels from the 1920s and '30s. ("The game's afoot, schweetheart," he had said in a really poor Bogart impression.) Ten dollars bought you a block, and while there was no limit to the number of blocks one could purchase, only one person could bet on each individual block.