The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  Leigh slid the shower door open partway and peeked in. “Hello there.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “You know anybody named Norm? Sounds like long distance.”

  I started to say no, then realized who it was and got out of the shower.

  “You know where the Albany VA is?” Wussy’s voice crackled in the receiver.

  I said I did.

  “Then you better get on up there.”

  I sat down. “Not again?”

  “Everywhere, this time. Or so I hear. Sorry, Sam’s Kid. I figured you’d want to know.”

  The oxygen mask that covered my father’s nose and mouth clouded, then cleared, then clouded again, tracking his sleeping respiration. His face was gaunt and yellow and rich with graying stubble. Even now he had most of his hair, though it had become patchy in the month or so since he’d called to tell me he was cured. The most dramatic change was in his body, which now occasioned little more than a ripple beneath the covers of the hospital bed. The arm that was connected to the I.V. was thin and dry and jaundiced. According to the nurse, he would be waking up soon when the pain killer he’d been given that morning began to wear off.

  On the wall opposite his bed was a print that depicted a New England winter. In the foreground a horse-drawn wagon was emerging from a covered bridge, below which stick figures were skating on the frozen river. I don’t know how long I’d been studying it when my father said, “That’s some goddamn picture, isn’t it?”

  He’d removed the oxygen mask so he could speak, but he immediately replaced it when he finished. He was looking at the painting as if it genuinely consumed his interest.

  “See how it’s on … the left side of the road?” he said. “The wagon? In a few … minutes it’ll be over there … on the right side … wait … you’ll see.”

  He could only get out a few words before breaking off, gulping oxygen. After catching his breath though, he inched like a crab toward a sitting position. When I saw what he was trying to do, I stood to help, but he waved me off and finally accomplished the design himself. The effort cost him his breath again and it was a while before he spoke. Finally, he said, “Who blabbed?”

  “Smooth called,” I said, lying instinctively to protect Wussy, realizing even as I spoke that there was no reason to protect anybody from Sam Hall’s wrath. Not anymore.

  “Figures,” he said, then thought about it. “How’d he get your number?”

  I said I was in the book, and that seemed to satisfy him.

  “Well,” he said. “This is about it, I’m afraid.”

  “They lied to you, didn’t they,” I said.

  He shrugged, closed his eyes sluggishly, opened them again. “That’s all right … I never believed them … anyway … when you still got it … you know.”

  “You might have told me.”

  He looked at me. “What for?”

  “Because I’m your son,” I said, almost adding, “because I love you.”

  “So … you had a month without … any headaches … my treat.”

  “I shouldn’t have believed you. I should have guessed.”

  “You never … could tell when I was lying,” he said, grinning weakly, in reference to our old game. “How’s your dolly?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “You figure you’ll marry her.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “You need somebody to … look after you … I never did, myself.”

  “She’s a good girl,” I said.

  “Seems like it,” he said. “Don’t bring her … here … I’d like to meet her but …” He looked away, in the general direction of the hall, which was brightly lit, in contrast to the perpetual dusk of the room.

  “See my new cheaters?” he said, spying them on the bedstand and handing them to me.

  I tried them on, made a face, handed them back to him.

  “New apartment … new glasses … new television … new furniture … old everything else. Smooth asks you … to pay for anything … tell him where to get off.”

  “I will.”

  Neither of us said anything for a minute, but I could tell he was worried about the way he was leaving things.

  “Do me a favor,” he said finally, taking off the oxygen mask and tossing it on the bed.

  “Sure,” I said, figuring that he was going to ask me to adjust the bed or something.

  “Take me home,” he said. “To hell with this place.”

  I blinked.

  But he’d swung his thin legs over the side of the bed and was pointing to the small closet where his clothes hung.

  I stood, but made no move to get them. “Dad,” I said. “You can’t. You’d never make it. We’d never make it.”

  “Just … do like I say for once,” he said.

  And then he stood up.

  Seeing him do it filled me with awe. There was absolutely nothing left of him, you see. The nurses would tell me later that he had not eaten in days. For a week he’d politely pushed the tray away when it was set in front of him, unless there was ice cream, which tasted good to him, for some reason. Then one night he’d seen they were serving something he remembered liking and was for some reason half hungry. He thought he’d try a little, provided they’d hold the gravy, which he never could eat even when he was healthy. But despite his plea it had come smothered with gravy, and he’d picked up the dish and tossed it out into the hall. When the tough head nurse came in and read him the riot act, he’d told her from now on they could serve the food any goddamn way they liked, because he wasn’t going to eat it anyway.

  “Have you ever been force-fed, Mr. Hall?” the nurse had asked him.

  “Have you ever had a spoon shoved up your ass?” he’d replied. “Sideways?”

  And the next night when he didn’t eat dinner he had the spoon in his hand when the nurse came in. She’d taken one look, shaken her head, and retreated, returning for the tray and the spoon after he’d fallen asleep. He hadn’t eaten since.

  So when he stood up and made clear to me that it was his intention to get dressed, with my help or without it, I did what I have never regretted doing. I got him his clothes and helped him into them. There weren’t enough holes in his belt, so we had to tie it in a knot to keep his pants up. He swam in everything else, too, and by the time we were finished, he looked like nothing so much as a pile of discarded clothing awaiting a Salvation Army truck.

  “Now,” he said. “Go steal me a wheelchair … strap that mask on before you leave.”

  And so I did, suddenly right in the spirit of things, as if by sneaking out of the hospital, we could sneak away from the disease. It was an ability he had right to the end, to involve me in any lunacy, by the sheer force of his will. So off I went in search of a wheelchair, as instructed, delighted to be of service, wondering only vaguely if I was doing something I could be prosecuted for later. It took me about five minutes to locate a wheelchair on an adjacent ward. By the time I returned with it, he had leaned back against the wall to rest, his booted feet up on the bed in front of him.

  He was fast asleep, the only visible sign of life the clouding, then clearing of his oxygen mask. He slept peacefully there until a nurse, the same one he’d asked about the spoon, came in, stopped dead in her tracks, assessed the situation at a glance and began undressing him. She was nearly finished when he woke up.

  “You again,” he said.

  “Me again,” she admitted.

  “This is my son,” he said. “He’s all right … not like his old man.”

  “He looks just like you,” she said.

  When she was gone, my father pointed toward the painting on the wall. “See?” he said. “Now the wagon’s on the left.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “How’d he do that?” my father wanted to know, as if he’d die a happy man if I could explain it to him. I couldn’t tell whether he meant the artist or the man driving the wagon, and I hadn’t the heart to tell
him that the wagon had been on the left side of the road all along, that it hadn’t moved since the last time we’d looked at it, that the picture was just a cheap print, unworthy of his attention when there were so many things to say, things that wouldn’t get said if we didn’t say them soon.

  But we sat there, my father and I, and stared at the wagon and the old covered bridge and the snow and the ice skaters and the frozen river, as if these were at the very heart of things, and had been forever.

  EPILOGUE

  At the airport I rented a car and took it onto the Thruway to avoid Albany, a gray city on the best of days, and this was not the best of days.

  The VA was on the other side of town at the end of a long treeless drive, a tall building, stark and massive and undeniable as death. I parked the rental at the base of a recently plowed mountain of dingy snow and went inside. I’d been told I would have trouble locating room 135, but it was right where it should have been. A woman with a name plate that corresponded to what I had jotted down the morning before when the call came telling me of Sam Hall’s death was standing in the office doorway, carrying on a conversation with another woman in full retreat down the corridor. “Did you get through to North Carolina?”

  The woman slowed, as if on an invisible leash, but continued to strain in the direction she was heading. “I got the sister-in-law. The brother is supposed to call when he gets home from work. I have my doubts.”

  “Get some ice on the eyes just in case,” said my woman, who became aware of me in midsentence.

  “Nice job you’ve got,” I said.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said, risking a half smile.

  “Couldn’t be,” I said, introducing myself.

  “Oh,” she said seriously. “Mr. Hall.”

  For some reason I remembered a gag used by good ole boys and politicians. “No, Mr. Hall’s my father. My name’s Ned.” I almost used it.

  The woman’s office was little more than a carrel with a small metal desk along one wall and several hundred brown packages, all one size, stacked all the way to the ceiling in one corner. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to sign a release,” she said. “We still can’t find the anatomical gift form.”

  I read the first sentence of the release and signed.

  “According to your father, there was another copy. Do you think you could locate it?” she said, as if she suspected, now that she thought about it, that my signature wasn’t likely to hold up.

  “I’ll try.”

  “That’s all any of us can do,” she said, without a trace of humor. “Here’s a list of the items you can pick up downstairs. And you get a flag, of course.”

  While I scanned the short itemized list—bathrobe, slippers, pajamas, wallet, button-down shirt, one pair of brown slacks, one pair of shorts, one pair of socks, one pair black shoes, one pair black overshoes, one overcoat, one wool cap—she stapled several onionskin documents to the inside of a manila folder, then got up and handed me one of the brown packages from the middle of the stack. It was surprisingly heavy.

  “What about his glasses?” I said.

  She looked at the list over my shoulder.

  “I don’t see any reference to eyeglasses.”

  “They were new. He’d just bought them.”

  “There’s no reference here … I could call up to the ward …”

  I said I didn’t see any reason to.

  She studied my signatures, the one on the itemized personal effects sheet, the other on the consent form, as if to make sure they matched. “This will make things go more smoothly. Your father was a generous man. You should know that he could be with us anywhere from three months to two years.”

  “I’ll try not to think about it.”

  “The research is important …”

  I said I didn’t doubt that.

  “We all thought a great deal of your father,” she said.

  I put the flag under my arm and stood up. “You knew him?”

  “No,” she said. “That is, not personally.”

  On the phone my mother had said it was a terrible, terrible shame. This was not in reference to Sam Hall’s death, but rather its timing. Isn’t it always the way, she wanted to know, her voice full of wonder, that at this time when we were all anticipating LIFE, when life was expected any day, any MINUTE, for heaven’s sake, that I’d be required to go to Mohawk and attend to the details of my father’s departure. She was sure that there would be endless details, given the clutter of my father’s existence: unplanned funeral arrangements, dealings with people he’d borrowed money from, tedious conversations with the sort of people he knew. Well, at least it wasn’t like he and I had been inseparable, she went on, by which she didn’t mean that I didn’t love him or wouldn’t feel his loss. Of course I would. After all, I was a dutiful son, but what she meant was, well, we were different and all those years when he wasn’t around, when he chose not to be, well, ironically, maybe it was just as well. She would never forget the devastation she’d felt when her own father died, and Lord knew she wouldn’t wish that on me. Did I want to say hello to Will? Wouldn’t you think they’d been best friends? she wanted to know. I should see the look on his face.

  From the VA I drove to Mohawk, the slender brown package of my father’s possessions on the front seat of the rental car with me, trying not to think about my mother, her insistence that I keep things in perspective (“Let’s talk about something cheerful! How’s our girl Leigh? I think if that baby doesn’t get here before the weekend, I’ll die, honestly!”).

  I parked out back of the McKinley Luxury Apartments next to my father’s pale yellow Subaru. It was still his, I would learn later. He hadn’t had money for repairs and didn’t want to admit to that. Didn’t want me making offers.

  When I went around front, I found Wussy sitting under the stone arch eating a sandwich. “Sam’s Kid,” he said, patting the stone step next to him.

  “Well,” I said, accepting his invitation to join him. The freakish February weather had gone from subzero to low fifties in a week, but the stone steps were still cold.

  “Right,” Wussy said. “Last week it was Untemeyer.”

  “No kidding,” I said. I’d always considered the bookie to be immortal. Even more than Sam Hall.

  “Died sitting up straight at the Mohawk Grill. Nobody noticed for a hell of a while. Fortunately, his stool was a little off balance and he eventually got turned around so he was staring out the back door, which was unnatural for Meyer. He faced front for about eighty-five years.”

  “You going over to Mike’s?” I said.

  “Not me, Sam’s Kid. I’m staying home where it’s safe.”

  I wished I didn’t have to go myself. Mike was closing The Elms at five, then holding there in the lounge what he referred to over the phone as a “send-off” in Sam Hall’s honor. I had an idea Irma was behind this, but I could have been wrong. The gathering would be by informal invitation. “Jesus Christ,” Mike said. “We gotta do something, even if it’s wrong.”

  I knew how he felt. One of the last things my father had made me promise was that there’d be no funeral, no mass, no priest making up lies about him from a pulpit. I’d said sure, whatever he wanted, not thinking I’d have any trouble keeping such a promise. After all, who’d have expected Sam Hall to exit life by way of the altar? He hadn’t been inside a church in thirty years. Besides, there wasn’t even going to be a body—Albany Medical had dibs on that for up to two years. But now, like Mike, I couldn’t help thinking that we should do something, whether my father had wanted it or not. So I’d gone along with a “send-off” at The Elms. At least that way there was something to tell people who called wanting to know when and where the services were going to be.

  The only trouble was that now, having agreed, I didn’t feel up to it. I even gave passing consideration to the idea of just slipping quietly out of town. It was doubtful I’d ever return to Mohawk after today, doubtful too that I’d even be miss
ed among my father’s cronies, most of whom had to be reminded who I was when we met on the street. The send-off looked to be the kind of obligation I could default on without meaningful consequence.

  “I wish I could get out of going myself,” I confessed to Wussy, thinking again of the semilegitimate justifications I might marshal in my own defense. Leigh had been having false labor pains for over a week. I could easily pretend to have received an urgent call. I could probably even talk Wussy into making my apologies for me. Perhaps because it would have been so easy, I decided not to act on the impulse.

  Wussy finished his sandwich and wadded up the cellophane. “You got here a couple minutes earlier I’d’ve shared that with you,” he said. “Now you’ll have to get your own.”

  “I need to go inside,” I told him. “The VA lost a form he signed. He must have figured they would and kept a copy. They can’t find his new glasses either.”

  “I happen to have a key,” he said, taking it off his chain.

  I started to ask why, then intuited the situation. They had not made up, Wussy and my father. If Wussy had a key, he had gotten it from Smooth, a master key, probably, that would get him into the other apartments, so he could do the work of the resident manager.

  We went inside the foyer and I inserted the key into the door of my father’s apartment, formerly the kindergarten of McKinley School. “I’ll be outside here if you need anything,” Wussy said, standing in the doorway as if he weren’t sure he’d been invited to follow. In fact, I didn’t think I could take any company. Not even his. I said I wouldn’t be long.

  “You been down to the bank yet?”

  I said I hadn’t. A week earlier my father had given me a check for just over two hundred dollars and made me promise to cash it before the bank froze his account. He was adamant that the electric company not get his last dime. Either Wussy knew about this too, or had guessed.