The Risk Pool

Sometimes Harry would grumble about the diner being “no place for a fuckin’ kid,” whereupon my father always wanted to know whose fault that was.
    Actually, since my father had cleaned me out, Harry was giving me more hours. My father had told him it was all right if I wanted them, and knowing my father, he probably figured he was in this fashion paying me back. Anyway, I worked Saturday mornings and early afternoons now, in addition to the hour and a half or so after school on days when enough dirty jobs had piled up. It wasn’t that long before I was back in the dough, and with the warmer weather coming I’d soon be starting up my golf ball business again. My father gave no indication of having located my new savings account, though I had to admit that this didn’t mean much, since he’d given no sign of locating the first one.
    At any rate, when Jack Ward had his heart attack, I was privy to the considerable discussion that the event occasioned. With the exception of my father, none of the men who frequented the Mohawk Grill had known Jack Ward personally, but they’d all seen him around and knew who he was and how much money he had, and so of course they were interested. In fact, Jack Ward’s death made religious mystics of them. The
idea
of it. If a guy that young and handsome and rich could just up and die like that, what the hell were any of them doing alive? After all, he hadn’t smoked, and they all did. Out at the Holiday Inn Jack Ward would order a Campari and soda and nurse it most of the night, whileHarry’s crew was over at Greenie’s slamming down boilermakers. Jesus, Jack Ward never even gambled, and that was the official town vice, all the others being unofficial ones. So what in holy hell was he doing dead?
    Though he tried not to let on, I could tell that Jack Ward’s death did rattle my father. The two of them had gone ashore on Utah Beach and surprised the hell out of themselves by living through the war. You’d have had to know my father pretty well to guess just how rattled he was though, because he played Jack Ward’s death like he played Liars—flawlessly, boldly, arrogantly. When the circumstances of the tragedy became known, nobody got more mileage out of his former friend’s death than my father. For Jack Ward, it seemed, had had a busy day.
    He’d arrived at the Mohawk Country Club around eleven and teed off with a foursome who played for a buck a hole, allowed pushes on the odd-numbered holes, an arrangement that established a new bet, double in value, from that point forward. By the end of the front nine Jack Ward had won enough to pay for lunch at the clubhouse, which he did. It was early in the season and the May air had been damp, so there were no takers for the back nine. In fact, Jack Ward had pretty much decided to forgo them himself until he ran into the pretty fiancée of the club pro who wanted to play and had nobody to play with. Jack Ward thought that a shame.
    They teed off on number ten around two-thirty, just as the sun came out from behind the clouds, quickly drying the short fair-way grass and making the two golfers glad to be alive. They had the course to themselves. On the elevated tee of the fifteenth hole, which overlooked the preceding three, they must have seen just how alone they were. The sixteenth hole contained a sharp dogleg, and there they stopped near the edge of the trees.
    “That’s the w-w-way I want to go, all right,” Tree said, standing up on the rungs of his stool so he could demonstrate proper hip movement. “In the s-s-saddle.”
    As sad as I was for Jack Ward, the one I couldn’t stop thinking about was the girl. Not Tria, though I thought about her too, fatherless now in the big white house. But rather the girl Jack Ward had been with there at the edge of the woods. I kept wondering what I’d have done in her place, and how she must have felt. She would have had to go for help, of course, but even that couldn’t have been easy. Apparently, she’d started off in thewrong direction, disoriented by the winding fairways, surrounded by trees. She imagined she was heading for the clubhouse, only to discover when she emerged from the woods that she wasn’t. Disoriented, she decided to do the sensible thing. Instead of guessing where the clubhouse was, she followed the fairways—first fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen, then eighteen, the green of which lay some twenty yards from the canopied terrace of the clubhouse. The