The Risk Pool

were the first. My father’s job had been to throw a round of burgers and hot dogs on as each foursome reached the tee. The food would be about done when the golfers sank the last of their putts. My father, all alone down there with the grill, presented such an inviting target that Smooth had used his mulligan to shoot at him, and the ball had dropped softly a few feet from the kettle, after which Smooth, Boyle, and Alan Taggartall yelled, “Fore!” My father picked up the ball and chucked it into the trees and yelled back something that sounded like “Five.”
    I had hit second, with the kind of nice smooth three-quarter swing I can almost never manage when I’m actually concentrating on the game. The ball rose and rose until I thought I had chosen the wrong club, gone way too far. But the distance was all illusion, and my ball hit on the green like a pillow. It was the first shot I’d hit on the whole front nine that looked like a real golf shot, and I was surprised by the pleasure that hitting and watching the ball produced, the ease with which, for a moment in time, it replaced all considerations of love, obligation, regret.
    I looked over to where my father was to see if he’d been watching, but he’d just raised the black lid of the Weber kettle and the smoke that billowed out obscured him entirely.

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    In the months that followed I tried to see him every other weekend or so, depending on his schedule with the Albany VA Hospital, which typically admitted him for treatments in the middle of the week, observed him for a day or two and released him until the next scheduled treatment with a list of specific dietary and behavioral instructions, which he wadded up and tossed in the receptacle outside the hospital’s main entrance. On one occasion he saved the dietary list and presented it to Harry at the Mohawk Grill.
    “I’d slice you a goddamn grapefruit, if you’d only do the rest,” Harry said seriously. This, I later discovered, was in reference to the fact that my father continued not only to drink between chemotherapy treatments, but to smoke as well, at least occasionally. He never smoked around me, but both Smooth and Boyle reported seeing him. When I asked my father about it, he said hecouldn’t have smoked if he’d wanted to, that the chemicals reacted to the nicotine and made him sick. I think that this was true during the first week or so after his treatments, but then for a few days before he was due for the next one, he’d start feeling human again, in celebration of which the party would begin.
    “As long as I have a few good days, I don’t care,” he told me. “When I start feeling bad all the while, they can all go fuck themselves. I told them so too, this last time.”
    I tried to plan my visits to coincide with his good days, just before he was due to be admitted back into the hospital. No doubt I’d have been more use to him during the bad days, but he didn’t want me around, then, to see him. Only when he sensed that his cycle was again on the upswing, when he could eat and function, would he call and say to come on up if I felt like it, if I had the time, if I was caught up on my work, if Leigh could spare me, if I didn’t have anything else going on. When I asked how the treatments had been going, he always said they were hell itself, but if they didn’t get any worse, he’d make it.
    On my father, the chemicals had the opposite of their predicted effect, binding him up so tight that for days he would yearn for the ecstasy of a bowel movement. During the first five or six days after his treatments, he remained in his dark apartment, getting out of bed only to try once more in the bathroom. If people came by wanting the services of the resident manager, he just ignored the knocking until they went away.
    On one of my visits during this period I learned that my father and Wussy had had a falling out. I’d been wondering about Wussy’s absence but when I asked, my father hadn’t been at all forthcoming. From Smooth, I learned that Wussy had been seeing a white woman and that my father had had an opinion on that subject. I knew that Sam Hall was not above such opinions or above voicing them, but I suspected that there was more to it than even Smooth understood. They had argued before, my father claiming it’d be a long cold day before he’d have anything to do with “that black bastard” again, but the next time I’d see him (granted, a month or two might have