The Risk Pool

first person to see her puffing up the long approach was her fiancé, who had just finished giving the lesson that had prevented him from playing with her to begin with. He hopped in a cart and headed out to meet her. By now the young woman was completely awash in guilt and utterly inarticulate, and the two of them headed back in the cart the way she had come. By the time they arrived back on the scene, Jack Ward, now in the fetal position, his splendid white trousers still down around his ankles, was struggling with his last breaths, his face gray, but remarkably calm, his longish hair in rakish disarray.
    Together, his two rescuers did the best they could with his pants and loaded him onto the golf cart. Then, since there was room for only two, the club pro again headed for the clubhouse, Jack Ward slumped up against him, leaving the girl to follow with Jack’s clubs over one shoulder, her own over the other. The full force of the tragedy, along with its attendant embarrassment, must have come home to the young woman somewhere along the long fairway of the par-five seventeenth, because the two sets of bags were later discovered leaning up against the ball washer on the eighteenth tee. From there she must have been able to see the assembled crowd on the clubhouse terrace and the tardy ambulance pulling in, and the whole sordid mess must have seemed more than she could contemplate.
    In all the excitement it was nearly forty-five minutes before her fiancé realized that she had not returned to the clubhouse, and even longer before he discovered that her car was no longer in the parking lot. And by the time things calmed down enough so that he could go over to her apartment and ask her just what the hell … she had thrown her clothes into the back of her Dodge Dart and departed Mohawk only three months after moving there. She was never seen again.
    Now, so many years after the fact, it is possible for me to see the dark comedy of these events, but at the time I saw nothing amusingabout Jack Ward’s tragic end. True, he had been little enough to me. I’d been in the man’s company only briefly and had spoken no more than a dozen words to him. Still, the fact that the details of his death should be the subject of lewd conversation at the Mohawk Grill and Greenie’s Tavern and the pool hall, not to mention the Mohawk Country Club, The Elms, and virtually every other public place, seemed to me criminal. When the men of the Mohawk Grill joked about Jack Ward dying in the saddle, I felt a strong homicidal impulse and I’d have erased the lot of them from the face of the earth had it been within my power.
    More than anything, though, the news of Jack Ward’s death made me want to find some dark and solitary place as far from my father and the men of the Mohawk Grill as I could get to reconsider the shape of things. For some reason, I settled on Our Lady of Sorrows, whose precincts I had not visited in several years. The church had not changed, though it was smaller than I remembered. My sign of the cross at the holy water font still felt natural, though I had not made one since moving in with my father, and anyone who saw my genuflection before slipping into one of the back pews wouldn’t have guessed how long it had been since my last. There was no one to see it though. Inside the church, it was just me and the late afternoon sun, barely strong enough to color the stained glass window along the upper story of the church. Everything below was lost in the general murk.
    Up on the main altar, Jesus was visible, thanks to the glow of the two red EXIT signs, which marked the sacristy side entrances and which stayed on even when electricity was cut to the lamps and chandeliers. The long low altar rail reminded me that once I had served at mass and that nobody had questioned my exhalted status, the appropriateness of my attendance upon the holiest rites, my bearing witness to the mysteries of the tabernacle.
    But surely the tabernacle had contained no mystery as profound as the death of Jack Ward. After all, you didn’t need a crystal ball to predict what was going to happen to Jesus. The way he’d gone about things it would have been a miracle if he
hadn’t
been crucified, it seemed to me. The empty tomb? Was that a mystery? The empty tabernacle I’d so often glimpsed over the shoulder of the old Monsignor? Its contents a mystery? Maybe, but not nearly so curious as the mystery of how anybody could be Jack Ward and