The Risk Pool by Richard Russo
When I got to Third Avenue, I headed north up the gentle hill toward the house that had been my mother’s and mine until her breakdown. The fact that the neighborhood had deteriorated was presaged by the cracked, heaving sidewalks that lined both sides of the narrow street. Every other house sported a sagging porch, railings with missing spindles, chipped and yellowed paint, rusted mailboxes. Our old house was one of the worst, and when I saw it I felt a deep sense of personal failure. Whoever owned the little house now had begun to paint it pale green, then run out of paint, or money, or energy. And this had happened at least one summer before, by the looks of it. There was a monster Buick Skylark up on blocks in the drive, and broken children’s toys strewn throughout the yard. Something was missing, too, and it took me a moment to realize what it was.
“Ice storm,” explained a woman who came out onto the back porch of the house next door when she saw me standing there outside her kitchen window, staring at the spot where my climbing tree had been. “Killed every tree on the block.”
It was true. When my mother and I had lived there, the street had been lined with mature trees along the narrow terrace between sidewalk and road. Not one was left, though a few slender young trees had been replanted. For some reason, these didn’t look like they’d ever grow to be much taller than the wire mesh that encircled and protected them.
“You can’t get decent people to live on a street that don’t have nice trees,” the woman said ruefully. “Where do you live?”
“New York City,” I admitted reluctantly, then added, “I used to live right here.”
“I lived here all my life,” the woman said. “In Mohawk, that is. This used to be my aunt’s house. Maybe you knew my aunt.”
She told me her aunt’s name, and I said that of course I had.
“I wouldn’t want to live anyplace else,” she said. “It gets worse here every year, but so does everyplace, is the way I look at it. Harold and I tried to plant new trees, but they won’t take because of the roots. You got to dig up the old stumps and go way down. It cost a lot and the roots go everywhere. Under the streets and the lawns. We got them in our cellar. And you seen the sidewalks.”
I said I had.
“You’d like to plant a tree or two, but where?”
“The roots will die eventually,” I said, trying to be optimistic, since she really wanted to plant trees.
“That’s what I said. Harold says no. He says they just petrify there in the ground, make it impossible for anything alive to find a space and grab ahold. ’Course Harold is a sourpuss. I think sometimes he just says things like that so he won’t have to go out and try. Some people would rather do without trees than dig a little hole.”
I had written my father’s new address on a note card and put it in my wallet. When I got there, I took the note card out to double-check, then set my bag down on the sidewalk and laughed out loud. “McKinley Luxury Apartments” the new sign said. Above the arched entrance, graven in stone, you could still see the old one: “McKinley School.” My father, it occurred to me now, had been just about my present age when he sat out front of the school in his white convertible, waiting for my young first grade teacher to bring me out, so I could explain why I was telling everybody he was dead.
There was nothing to do but walk up that long sloping terrace, just as I had done every morning, grades one through six, so I did, half expecting the old bell to sound. Beneath the stone arch was a row of mailboxes and buzzers, and above the first of these was a label that said: S. Hall, resident manager. I pushed the buzzer and waited. Then I wandered around back where there was a big metal dumpster and a parking lot that was empty except for half a dozen cars, one of which was a yellow Subaru. It was unlocked, so I tossed my bag inside, checked to make sure he hadn’t left the keys in the ignition, and locked it up. Across the street, where a corner market had been when I was a kid, there was now an establishment called Trip’s, and Trip’s had a big green, triangular cocktail glass tilted over the front door. It looked like a good place to begin.
And there he was, swung around on his bar stool so he could follow the action at the shufflebowl machine. His head was cocked strangely, as if he were trying to see out from under his glasses and along the bridge of his nose. When I sat down next to him, he rotated around to see who it was. “Hey!” he said. “You’re in New York!”
“No,” I said. “I’m right here.”
“I can see that. How come?”
“I thought you invited me. What’s wrong with your neck?” He was tilted back, almost off the stool so he could look me over.
“Stiff as a bitch,” he said. “Hurts, too. You bring your golf clubs?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I’ll rent some.”
“Can you do that?”
“Sure,” I said. “Even in Mohawk.”
One of the shufflebowl players, a guy about forty, dressed in a pale blue summer cardigan and breezy, lightweight slacks came over. “The resident manager is up,” he said.
“Say hello to Smooth,” my father said. “He owns this joint, along with those overpriced apartments across the street.”
We shook hands, Smooth grinning at my father as we did. “What do I get from Sam Hall? Heartache. He gets his apartment for free, I buy the bar across the street so my legitimate tenants will know where to find the resident manager, and what do I get for my trouble? Heartache.” He was grinning at me now. “It’s worth it though, because I won the bet.”
“Your ass,” my father said.
“I bet him a hundred bucks two months ago that before the year was out, Sam Hall’d go back to school.”
“You got room for one more tomorrow?” my father said.
“You don’t have to ask. You’re the resident manager. You got privileges,” Smooth said, then to me, “You play golf?”
“Not well,” I admitted.
“Can he rent clubs?” my father said.
“I got an extra set,” Smooth said. “They wouldn’t shoot straight for me, but they might for him. The only trouble is, they’re home.”
“Uh-oh,” my father said.
“How pissed off can she be?” Smooth said. “It was a week ago. You can’t keep a man out of his own house forever. There’s a law.”
My father got down off the stool, rather gingerly, it seemed to me, and headed for the shufflebowl. “His mother kept me out of mine for about twenty years,” he said.
“Who can blame her?” Smooth said. Then, when my father was out of earshot, he said, “I’m glad you decided to come up. He said you weren’t going to.”
We watched my father hunch over the bowling machine, peering over the top of his glasses now at the still quivering pins. His first frame was a strike, but in the second he hit the head pin straight on and left a seven-ten split.
“He’s all set up over there. They delivered the furniture yesterday,” Smooth said, but there was something in his tone I didn’t understand, as if there might be an irony about the arrangement. “Don’t say I said anything, but he talks about you all the time. My son the publisher.”
When the game was finished and my father came back over, Smooth said, “How’d you get such a smart kid?”
“I let his mother raise him.”
“Good strategy,” Smooth said. “Remind me of it if I ever start talking about going home.”
“You never listened to anything I told you yet,” my father said.
“It’s the secret of my success,” Smooth said. “You’re like a compass that points due south. I look where you’re headed and go the other way. Speaking of which, I better go bail for Uncle Willie before they get him settled in for the night.” He turned to me. “Can you believe the cops in this town? Popping eighty-year-old bookies?”
“Don’t forget about the golf clubs,” my father said.
“I’ll be back,” Smooth said. “You’ll be able to remind me half a dozen more times.”
“I won’t be here,”
“Sure you won’t,” Smooth said.
When he was gone, my father looked me over. “Getting pretty fancy in your old age,” he said.
I looked down at what I was wearing, trying to imagine what it was that struck him as fancy.
“You didn’t bring anything with you?” he said.
“One bag.”
He looked around. “What’d you do with it?”
I told him I’d locked it in the Subaru.
“Good,” he said. “Only trouble is I sold it to a guy last week.”
“Why is it out back of the apartment?”
“He said it wouldn’t start. I’ve been meaning to try it myself, but I keep forgetting.”
“You know his number?”
“No, why?”
“My stuff’s locked up inside,” I said.
“Don’t worry, I kept a spare key, in case I needed to borrow it someday.”
“What’d you buy?”
“Nothing. What do I need a car for?” he said. “Grocery store a block away. New place, new furniture, new TV …”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Most of the time I sit around. Something breaks over there, I fix it. If I can’t fix it, I call somebody who can. Smooth always has a dozen things going on. Buys old buildings for taxes and fixes them up. If he needs somebody to sleep in one, make sure nobody walks off with the sheetrock, I do it. For that I get the apartment and a couple bucks under the table that nobody’s gotta know about. Company truck if I need it.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said.
“It is perfect,” he said, swinging halfway around to look at me. “There isn’t a goddamn thing in the world wrong with it. Except I got cancer.”
The next day I played in a foursome that contained a rather dour-spirited lawyer named Henderson Boyle; an insane high school English teacher named Alan Taggart who, by conservative estimate, did hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the course, taking monstrous divots with every swing, the clods of moist earth traveling, in most instances, considerably farther than his pristine ball; and Smooth himself, who seemed in the same extraordinarily good spirits as the night before. It took us fifteen minutes to get off the first tee because every time Smooth got into the middle of his backswing, he’d remember a funny story he wanted to share with us, the best being the one about Untemeyer, who had gone meekly to jail after being arrested, said nothing to nobody until Smooth appeared with bail, whom he proceeded to bawl out for taking so long.
The other three players were making complex wagers from hole to hole. I think they would have liked me to get in on the betting, but after they saw my swing they were too kind to insist. Actually, I might have been able to break more or less even by beating Alan Taggart, but I was just as happy to be out of it altogether. The real contest was between Smooth and Boyle, who watched each other carefully without seeming to. We all ignored Alan Taggart’s woes. The only time Smooth spoke to him was when he stepped up to address his own ball, and he continued to talk right through his swing, finishing his sentence at the precise moment of impact. “The ball, Tag, the goddamn ball! Hit the ball! The ball’s the key to the whole thing, Tag! Hit the goddamn ball! Don’t fuck with the ground!” And then, whack—Smooth’s Titleist would jump off the tee, climbing an invisible ladder until it reached a tall plateau before dropping, as if off the end of a table into the middle of the smooth fairway.
Immediately after which, Alan Taggart took an even more heroic divot and then flung his club in its pursuit.
“Great follow-through, you gotta admit,” Smooth whispered, arm around my shoulder. “Your old man fess up last night?”
I said he had.
“What’d you tell him to do?”
“You don’t tell Sam Hall what to do,” I said, though I had, last night. “I said I didn’t see where he had much choice.”
“That’s what I told him,” Smooth said. “When a doctor says you can either take the treatments or plan on being dead in two months, you take the goddamn treatments. Boyle says the same thing.”
Actually, I wasn’t so sure. According to what my father had told me, the tumor was large, advanced, positioned on the lung so as to be inoperable. He would have to take the most potent and dangerous chemotherapy there was, my father had said, six months of it, assuming you lasted six months. But if he could live through it, he might be able to buy another five years. Who knew? Maybe ten years. Who the hell knew?
“I told them I didn’t want to trade two months for six months,” he said. “They can shove the extra four, and I told ’em so.”
But there was little heart behind this bravado, and when he was all through telling me about the conditions he’d laid down for the doctors, he’d sighed and said, “They got me by the balls, I’m afraid.”
“Cancer doesn’t always mean death anymore,” I said. “Things have changed.”
“That’s what they said down at the VA.” He nodded. “But death’s what it’s going to be in my case, so you better get used to the idea. The tumor’s already the size of a golf ball. Bigger. They showed me on the X ray, just in case I didn’t believe them.”
Smooth shook his head as we waited for Boyle to hit from behind a tree. “Anybody else, there’d be no argument, but Sam Hall …”
“Is Sam Hall,” I finished.
“He’ll do what you tell him though,” Smooth said. “If you say take the treatments, I think he will.”
Actually, I suspected that the convincing was just a formality. My father wanted to make a show of saying the hell with it, but his mind was already made up. Over the phone he had told me that next week would be bad for a visit, and last night he’d told me that if he decided to do the treatments, they’d be admitting him on Tuesday to begin the first series and keeping him over the weekend for observation. “I may just tell them to fuck off,” my father kept saying, but he wasn’t going to.
“What the hell,” he said before we left Trip’s to see if we could find the key to the Subaru. “Try it once or twice, I guess. If they make me feel worse than I do now, then no more.” He rubbed the back of his neck and blinked. “I don’t see how I can feel much worse.”
“You’ll never guess what he was doing up till a week ago,” Smooth said. “Ask Boyle. Boyle! Come here. Hit later. Let Tag have honors for once. Don’t be a hog.”
Boyle came over.
“Tell Ned what his old man was doing for his stiff neck before he went to the hospital. TAG! THE BALL! THE BALL’S THE KEY!”
We all watched Alan Taggart tee off.
“A goddamn chiropractor he was going to,” Smooth said, having apparently forgotten that he’d brought Boyle over to impart this intelligence. “Too bad it wasn’t a brain tumor, I told him. Then you could have gone to a proctologist. You’re up, Boyle! Hit, for Christ’s sake.”
The strange part of all this was that Smooth was just what I needed that day. His mouth went nonstop, reducing everything to low comedy. Clearly, it took more than somebody else’s cancer to sober him or dampen his spirits. In fact, he gave the impression that it would take more than his own cancer to dampen them. (I would learn from my father that he had recently undergone triple bypass heart surgery.) The reality of the present situation seemed to support his philosophy, which I took to mean that, whatever else you said about it, life was entertaining as hell. After all, here I was, playing golf for the first time in years, less than twenty-four hours after learning of my father’s malignant disease.
And where was Sam Hall? Where else but racing back and forth among the foursomes Smooth had organized, two ice chests full of beer strapped to the back of his motorized golf cart in the compartment designated for clubs.
“No wonder you’re in the risk pool,” Boyle observed when my father skidded to a halt on the cart path on number twelve after we’d stopped for lunch. Smooth had won fifty dollars from him on the front nine and it didn’t look to me like his fortunes were going to improve significantly on the back, ev
My own game was not much better. I’d lost two balls to the water, and wondered as I saw them rupture the serene surface of the pond whether there might be an enterprising twelve-year-old off in the trees, awaiting dusk and the chance to fish the murky depths.
On the hole where Jack Ward had had his heart attack and died, my father rolled up beside me in the beer cart.