The Risk Pool

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 thedoctors, 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 Ineeded 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, even though Boyle was only pretending to drink and Smooth was powering down one can of beer after another. Alan Taggart, who had pulled a huge wad of bills out of his canary-yellow slacks and handed several to Smooth, drank viciously, draining each can in a few gulps, crushing them as they were poised over his mouth, and then hooking them off into the woods. After muffing his tee shot on ten, he examined his driver maliciously and calmly wrapped it around the ball washer. Boyle must have seen the look on my face, because he came over and said that there was no reason to be alarmed. This sort of thing had