The Risk Pool

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,” my father said.
    “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 untilSmooth 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