The Risk Pool

happened before. It was almost certainly Taggart’s intention to arrive back at the clubhouse with an empty bag. “Just be prepared to say no if he asks you to borrow your putter.”
    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.
    “You ready for one?” he said.
    “Sure,” I said. “How’s your neck?”
    “Not too bad,” he said, clearly surprised to have forgotten it for a while. “I put some of this stuff on it.”
    He held out a jar of liniment for me to inspect. It looked a like cold cream jar but the gel inside emitted a powerful odor I’d caught a whiff of earlier.
    “You can’t buy it,” he said. “You gotta know somebody who has horses.”
    I blinked at this non sequitur. “Say again.”
    “Horse liniment.”
    I didn’t know what to say. My father was treating lung cancer with horse liniment. “Who do you know that has horses?” I said.
    “Smooth owns part interest in a couple trotters. Damn stuff works, too. The only trouble is you can taste it. Goes right through your neck and ends up on your tongue. I don’t know how. I haven’t been licking my neck, I know that.”
    He handed me a beer and popped one for himself, making a face at the way it tasted. The other three players were on the other side of the fairway, and we were all waiting for Alan Taggart, who was away as usual.
    “You having a good time?” my father asked, as if it were important to him that I was.
    “Sure,” I said.
    “I never thought I’d like golf,” he said, “but it’s all right.”
    I looked at him to see if this might be a joke.
    “It’s nice out here,” he said, “and these are all good guys.”
    Alan Taggart swung and his orange ball burped and ran a few feet.
    “Tag’s an asshole, of course.”
    “English teachers must do pretty well in Mohawk County,” I said, recalling the wad of bills he’d flashed.
    “Not really,” my father said. “His old man died and left him about half a million.”
    After the duff, Taggart was looking around for a tree, I could tell, and regretting there weren’t any in the center of the fairway.
    “I’m afraid I’m not going to have a fortune to leave you,” my father said.
    I managed a grin. “That’s a shame,” I said. “I was really counting on it.”
    “Whatever I got is yours. Boyle said he’d draw it up, so you’ll be all set. It won’t cost either one of us, so …”
    Across the fairway they were waving for me to hit.
    “Concentrate on getting better,” I suggested, taking out an iron.
    My father watched me address the ball, and together we watched its waffling flight. “What about this girl of yours?”
    “What
about
her?”
    “Is she it, or what?”
    “She’s trying to decide whether
I’m
it,” I admitted. “She has her doubts.”
    “How come?”
    I shrugged.
    “Well,” he said. “If she decides you are, be good to her. Don’t end up old and stupid if you can help it.”
    What he hadn’t added to old and stupid, was “alone,” but it was hanging there in the air, understood, anyway.
    From across the fairway a cry had gone up for the beer wagon, and my father, who was contemptuous of cart paths, sped directly across the fairway. Before he got to where the others were waiting, I saw him make a wide loop and retrace his path. I didn’t understand what he was up to until I saw Boyle take off after him. On the second pass, my father had located the lawyer’s golf ball on the moist fairway, the heavy front wheel of the cart driving it deep into the sod where it would take an Alan Taggart to dig it out. “Play it as it lays!” I heard Smooth hoot. “Play that sucker as it lays.”
    The rest of the weekend was an alcoholic haze, and when I got back to New York late Sunday night, my father having promised to check into the VA on Tuesday like he was supposed to, I told Leigh only that he had cancer. Had I been able to share any of the rest of it with her, I’d have told her about the ninth hole, a par three with an elevated tee that overlooked the clubhouse. Off to one side my father had set up a Weber kettle from which plumes of smoke rose. There were five foursomes in Smooth’s entourage, of which we