The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “You ready for one?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “How’s your neck?”

  “Not too bad,” he said, clearly surprised to have forgotten it for a while. “I put some of this stuff on it.”

  He held out a jar of liniment for me to inspect. It looked a like cold cream jar but the gel inside emitted a powerful odor I’d caught a whiff of earlier.

  “You can’t buy it,” he said. “You gotta know somebody who has horses.”

  I blinked at this non sequitur. “Say again.”

  “Horse liniment.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My father was treating lung cancer with horse liniment. “Who do you know that has horses?” I said.

  “Smooth owns part interest in a couple trotters. Damn stuff works, too. The only trouble is you can taste it. Goes right through your neck and ends up on your tongue. I don’t know how. I haven’t been licking my neck, I know that.”

  He handed me a beer and popped one for himself, making a face at the way it tasted. The other three players were on the other side of the fairway, and we were all waiting for Alan Taggart, who was away as usual.

  “You having a good time?” my father asked, as if it were important to him that I was.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I never thought I’d like golf,” he said, “but it’s all right.”

  I looked at him to see if this might be a joke.

  “It’s nice out here,” he said, “and these are all good guys.”

  Alan Taggart swung and his orange ball burped and ran a few feet.

  “Tag’s an asshole, of course.”

  “English teachers must do pretty well in Mohawk County,” I said, recalling the wad of bills he’d flashed.

  “Not really,” my father said. “His old man died and left him about half a million.”

  After the duff, Taggart was looking around for a tree, I could tell, and regretting there weren’t any in the center of the fairway.

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to have a fortune to leave you,” my father said.

  I managed a grin. “That’s a shame,” I said. “I was really counting on it.”

  “Whatever I got is yours. Boyle said he’d draw it up, so you’ll be all set. It won’t cost either one of us, so …”

  Across the fairway they were waving for me to hit.

  “Concentrate on getting better,” I suggested, taking out an iron.

  My father watched me address the ball, and together we watched its waffling flight. “What about this girl of yours?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she it, or what?”

  “She’s trying to decide whether I’m it,” I admitted. “She has her doubts.”

  “How come?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well,” he said. “If she decides you are, be good to her. Don’t end up old and stupid if you can help it.”

  What he hadn’t added to old and stupid, was “alone,” but it was hanging there in the air, understood, anyway.

  From across the fairway a cry had gone up for the beer wagon, and my father, who was contemptuous of cart paths, sped directly across the fairway. Before he got to where the others were waiting, I saw him make a wide loop and retrace his path. I didn’t understand what he was up to until I saw Boyle take off after him. On the second pass, my father had located the lawyer’s golf ball on the moist fairway, the heavy front wheel of the cart driving it deep into the sod where it would take an Alan Taggart to dig it out. “Play it as it lays!” I heard Smooth hoot. “Play that sucker as it lays.”

  The rest of the weekend was an alcoholic haze, and when I got back to New York late Sunday night, my father having promised to check into the VA on Tuesday like he was supposed to, I told Leigh only that he had cancer. Had I been able to share any of the rest of it with her, I’d have told her about the ninth hole, a par three with an elevated tee that overlooked the clubhouse. Off to one side my father had set up a Weber kettle from which plumes of smoke rose. There were five foursomes in Smooth’s entourage, of which we were the first. My father’s job had been to throw a round of burgers and hot dogs on as each foursome reached the tee. The food would be about done when the golfers sank the last of their putts. My father, all alone down there with the grill, presented such an inviting target that Smooth had used his mulligan to shoot at him, and the ball had dropped softly a few feet from the kettle, after which Smooth, Boyle, and Alan Taggart all yelled, “Fore!” My father picked up the ball and chucked it into the trees and yelled back something that sounded like “Five.”

  I had hit second, with the kind of nice smooth three-quarter swing I can almost never manage when I’m actually concentrating on the game. The ball rose and rose until I thought I had chosen the wrong club, gone way too far. But the distance was all illusion, and my ball hit on the green like a pillow. It was the first shot I’d hit on the whole front nine that looked like a real golf shot, and I was surprised by the pleasure that hitting and watching the ball produced, the ease with which, for a moment in time, it replaced all considerations of love, obligation, regret.

  I looked over to where my father was to see if he’d been watching, but he’d just raised the black lid of the Weber kettle and the smoke that billowed out obscured him entirely.

  43

  In the months that followed I tried to see him every other weekend or so, depending on his schedule with the Albany VA Hospital, which typically admitted him for treatments in the middle of the week, observed him for a day or two and released him until the next scheduled treatment with a list of specific dietary and behavioral instructions, which he wadded up and tossed in the receptacle outside the hospital’s main entrance. On one occasion he saved the dietary list and presented it to Harry at the Mohawk Grill.

  “I’d slice you a goddamn grapefruit, if you’d only do the rest,” Harry said seriously. This, I later discovered, was in reference to the fact that my father continued not only to drink between chemotherapy treatments, but to smoke as well, at least occasionally. He never smoked around me, but both Smooth and Boyle reported seeing him. When I asked my father about it, he said he couldn’t have smoked if he’d wanted to, that the chemicals reacted to the nicotine and made him sick. I think that this was true during the first week or so after his treatments, but then for a few days before he was due for the next one, he’d start feeling human again, in celebration of which the party would begin.

  “As long as I have a few good days, I don’t care,” he told me. “When I start feeling bad all the while, they can all go fuck themselves. I told them so too, this last time.”

  I tried to plan my visits to coincide with his good days, just before he was due to be admitted back into the hospital. No doubt I’d have been more use to him during the bad days, but he didn’t want me around, then, to see him. Only when he sensed that his cycle was again on the upswing, when he could eat and function, would he call and say to come on up if I felt like it, if I had the time, if I was caught up on my work, if Leigh could spare me, if I didn’t have anything else going on. When I asked how the treatments had been going, he always said they were hell itself, but if they didn’t get any worse, he’d make it.

  On my father, the chemicals had the opposite of their predicted effect, binding him up so tight that for days he would yearn for the ecstasy of a bowel movement. During the first five or six days after his treatments, he remained in his dark apartment, getting out of bed only to try once more in the bathroom. If people came by wanting the services of the resident manager, he just ignored the knocking until they went away.

  On one of my visits during this period I learned that my father and Wussy had had a falling out. I’d been wondering about Wussy’s absence but when I asked, my father hadn’t been at all forthcoming. From Smooth, I learned that Wussy had been seeing a white woman and that my father had had an opinion on that subject. I knew that Sam Hall was not above such opinions or above voicing them, but I suspected that there was more to it than
even Smooth understood. They had argued before, my father claiming it’d be a long cold day before he’d have anything to do with “that black bastard” again, but the next time I’d see him (granted, a month or two might have elapsed), they’d be on adjacent bar stools. Now, the timing of the whole thing was suggestive. Perhaps they had fallen out before my father was diagnosed, but his stubbornness about not reconciling I took to be another instance of his wanting to do his most intense suffering in private. The current posture of anger and misunderstanding ensured that Wussy would not be coming by when he wasn’t wanted, offering assistance when my father wanted only to be left alone in his dark den.

  I didn’t realize how badly he needed to be alone during the worst of it until he miscalculated and had me come up before his personal pendulum had truly begun its upswing. He’d felt decent the day before, but by the time I arrived in Mohawk the next afternoon, he’d backslid into intense nausea, constipation, and their attendant depression. I found him in his dark, foul-smelling bedroom, almost unable to turn over, all the window shades drawn, as if to ensure that none of the pestilential atmosphere be allowed to dissipate. Despite his efforts to eat, he had by then begun to lose weight noticeably, and his skin had taken on a yellow tinge. His eyes were so wild and red that he resembled nothing so much as a rabid animal. “Perfect,” he said when I appeared. He’d given me the spare key so I could come in and drop my stuff off before searching him out. “My son’s here to watch me croak.”

  In fact, he looked like he would not live out the day, but when I sat down at the edge of the bed and tried to take his hand, he pulled it away with more strength than I imagined he possessed.

  I took a room for the night in a sleazy motel on the highway and tried to think of what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the city, leaving him in such a dreadful condition, but I made up my mind that I would, in the morning, if he showed no improvement. That evening I ate a hamburg steak in the Mohawk Grill where, except for Harry, I saw absolutely no one I knew. To kill some time I took a walk in the gathering dusk, ending up, for some reason, outside the chain-link fence that surrounded Our Lady of Sorrows. In the wide expanse between the church and the rectory, there was now nothing but lawn. All of Skinny Donovan’s flowers had gone the way of Skinny Donovan. In their place the lawn had been resodded and the grass cared for meticulously, but it seemed to me, as I stood there in the gathering darkness, that the grass where the flowers had once been tended was a shade or two darker, and that, if you cared to see it, there was the old shape of the cross that Skinny and I had mowed around, still visible in the center of the broad lawn canvas.

  Or maybe I just wanted to see it there. I changed my mind about the cross sometime during the night in my shabby motel room where I lay thinking of Leigh and myself and our unborn child. I must have been the only person in the ten-unit motel who was registered for the entire night. On both sides of me there were a great many comings and goings, and I was awakened once, long after midnight, when something crashed on the other side of the wall, and a young woman’s voice rose from a low moan all the way up the musical scale to a high-pitched lament, then back down again and into silence.

  At seven the next morning, when the phone rang, I expected to hear the voice of the old satyr of a desk clerk, with whom I had left a wake-up call before retiring the night before. Instead, it was my father, sounding chipper and none the worse for wear. “You gonna sleep all day or do you want to have some breakfast with me?”

  I sat up in bed and shook my head to clear the cobwebs. The background racket put him at the Mohawk Grill, which explained how he knew where I was. I’d told Harry the night before. “How are you?” I said.

  “Not so bad I need anybody to hold my hand.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “I got through one war with the Germans and another with your mother without needing any of that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Pardon me for being concerned.”

  “You want me to come out there?”

  “I can walk in,” I told him. “I walked out.”

  “Stay there.”

  I went outside and waited. A minute later he pulled into the motel parking lot in a new Lincoln. I got in. “Who belongs to this?”

  “Smooth,” my father said. “He needs a big car. His wife makes him sleep in it half the time.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as an easy guy to be married to.”

  “He’s okay. Just young and loaded with money and full of vinegar.”

  The last couple times I’d been to Mohawk, we’d ended up drinking and playing the horses with Smooth and company in Trip’s bar. Untemeyer was getting too old to make his usual rounds, so he set up shop permanently at Trip’s after his noon hour at the Mohawk Grill. Most of his action came from Smooth’s cronies and they set him up in a comfortable booth where he could write out his slips and complain about his bad back, which he blamed on having been incarcerated and left to rot for nearly three hours in the Mohawk jail by Smooth’s inefficiency in getting him sprung.

  It took a while, but it finally dawned on me that my father’s association with this new younger crowd (Untemeyer excepted) signaled a significant change in him. From the time I was a boy, I had always been vaguely aware that there wasn’t much that happened in Mohawk that my father didn’t have a line on. If it was shady, he probably knew all about it, who was involved, what the risks were. As often as not, he’d been asked if he wanted in, or what he thought of the whole deal. Frequently he’d be drawn aside by somebody who slid into Harry’s with an air of wished-for invisibility and engaged my father in an urgent, voices-lowered conversation. My sense of things was that my father seldom engaged in anything more serious than filling up at a closed gas station, or driving a car with a full trunk from one place to another, or engaging the fat cop on the corner in a conversation to keep him where he was instead of ambling up the street where somebody would just as soon he not be for another twenty minutes. But he was thought to be savvy by Mohawk’s dumber petty criminals, and they consulted him the way one consults a stock broker. Often their conversations ended with my father saying, “Not if it was me, I wouldn’t.”

  But the days when not much got past him were gone, as I discovered with respect to Alan Taggart, who was one of the semiregulars in Trip’s and who was so obviously a dealer that I was astonished that my father hadn’t tumbled to the fact. Unless of course he had, and simply wasn’t sharing the knowledge with me. He’d always considered me a bit slow, permanently impaired by my mother’s ethics and my early days as an altar boy. But I don’t think this was the case, at least with regard to Alan Taggart, whose wealth my father had explained to me as having been inherited. The reason I’m so certain on this point is that one afternoon, after I’d walked in on a bathroom transaction, Smooth asked me not to mention it to my father. “He’s death on recreational narcotics,” Smooth explained conspiratorially, as if this were the one fault he could find with my father’s otherwise sterling character.

  What concerned me most about my father’s new friends, though they may have been, as he said, “all good guys,” according to the rather amorphous standards by which good guys are credentialed, was that I suspected that he was drawn to them not so much because they were mildly disreputable, which would have been in character, as because they were all successful. He had never buddied with lawyers, contractors, and real estate people before, and he seemed to be discovering, late in life, that he enjoyed the company of men whose manners and dress and wit would have made him feel awkward or even inadequate when he was younger. I remembered with some embarrassment the way he had behaved around Jack Ward, with whom he had served in the war, where social distinctions disappeared under the constant assault of threatened annihilation and the absolute need for competence. There was nothing like fear to make democracy real. But my father must have learned almost immediately after returning from Germany that the democracy he had fought to preserve was class-riddled. His attempts at jovial camaraderi
e with Jack Ward, as I now recalled them, had been closer to obsequious fawning.

  Nor was this all. I often suspected that another motive in cultivating these new friends was myself. My father introduced each new person who came into Trip’s according to his profession—pediatrician, insurance salesman, chiropractor (he held no grudge against the chiropractor who had failed to cure his lung cancer), dentist. His son was a professional and, therefore, must be provided with professional acquaintances during his visits. Five years earlier, such behavior would have been entirely out of character for my father, who went into his lawyer diatribe, the one he’d so often directed against F. William Peterson, at the slightest provocation. But no more. How could he, with Boyle seated two stools down, and Sam Hall the only working stiff in the joint.

  When we got downtown, my father parked Smooth’s Lincoln across from the Mohawk Grill (Smooth had his office two doors down, on Main) and we crossed the street. The diner was the only establishment the length of the street that was open, but for some reason a young woman was coming toward us from the direction of the Four Corners. She was pushing an unhappy infant in a tattered stroller and had two small grubby children in tow. At first I did not recognize Claude Schwartz’s wife, though she had not changed significantly in either looks or expression.

  When I stopped to say hello—I wouldn’t have, except I feared she had recognized me too—my father went on into the diner, leaving the two of us in the street with the crying infant and the two quiet, staring, older children.

  “You know what he done,” the girl said, as if she meant to suggest that Claude, in abandoning them, had been acting on my explicit instructions.

  I said I had heard and felt myself flush, perhaps because of the fact that if Claude had asked my opinion, I might very well have given this counsel.

  “I knew he wasn’t no good,” she said. “His own mother says so. He caught me on the rebound or it never would have happened.”