The Risk Pool

elapsed), they’d be on adjacent bar stools. Now, the timing of the whole thing was suggestive. Perhaps they had fallen out before my father was diagnosed, but his stubbornness about not reconciling I took to be another instance of his wanting to do his most intense suffering in private. The current posture of anger and misunderstanding ensured thatWussy would not be coming by when he wasn’t wanted, offering assistance when my father wanted only to be left alone in his dark den.
    I didn’t realize how badly he needed to be alone during the worst of it until he miscalculated and had me come up before his personal pendulum had truly begun its upswing. He’d felt decent the day before, but by the time I arrived in Mohawk the next afternoon, he’d backslid into intense nausea, constipation, and their attendant depression. I found him in his dark, foul-smelling bedroom, almost unable to turn over, all the window shades drawn, as if to ensure that none of the pestilential atmosphere be allowed to dissipate. Despite his efforts to eat, he had by then begun to lose weight noticeably, and his skin had taken on a yellow tinge. His eyes were so wild and red that he resembled nothing so much as a rabid animal. “Perfect,” he said when I appeared. He’d given me the spare key so I could come in and drop my stuff off before searching him out. “My son’s here to watch me croak.”
    In fact, he looked like he would not live out the day, but when I sat down at the edge of the bed and tried to take his hand, he pulled it away with more strength than I imagined he possessed.
    I took a room for the night in a sleazy motel on the highway and tried to think of what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the city, leaving him in such a dreadful condition, but I made up my mind that I would, in the morning, if he showed no improvement. That evening I ate a hamburg steak in the Mohawk Grill where, except for Harry, I saw absolutely no one I knew. To kill some time I took a walk in the gathering dusk, ending up, for some reason, outside the chain-link fence that surrounded Our Lady of Sorrows. In the wide expanse between the church and the rectory, there was now nothing but lawn. All of Skinny Donovan’s flowers had gone the way of Skinny Donovan. In their place the lawn had been resodded and the grass cared for meticulously, but it seemed to me, as I stood there in the gathering darkness, that the grass where the flowers had once been tended was a shade or two darker, and that, if you cared to see it, there was the old shape of the cross that Skinny and I had mowed around, still visible in the center of the broad lawn canvas.
    Or maybe I just wanted to see it there. I changed my mind about the cross sometime during the night in my shabby motel room where I lay thinking of Leigh and myself and our unbornchild. I must have been the only person in the ten-unit motel who was registered for the entire night. On both sides of me there were a great many comings and goings, and I was awakened once, long after midnight, when something crashed on the other side of the wall, and a young woman’s voice rose from a low moan all the way up the musical scale to a high-pitched lament, then back down again and into silence.
    At seven the next morning, when the phone rang, I expected to hear the voice of the old satyr of a desk clerk, with whom I had left a wake-up call before retiring the night before. Instead, it was my father, sounding chipper and none the worse for wear. “You gonna sleep all day or do you want to have some breakfast with me?”
    I sat up in bed and shook my head to clear the cobwebs. The background racket put him at the Mohawk Grill, which explained how he knew where I was. I’d told Harry the night before. “How are you?” I said.
    “Not so bad I need anybody to hold my hand.”
    “Good,” I said.
    “I got through one war with the Germans and another with your mother without needing any of that.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Pardon me for being concerned.”
    “You want me to come out there?”
    “I can walk in,” I told him. “I walked out.”
    “Stay there.”
    I went outside and waited. A minute later he pulled into the motel parking lot in a new Lincoln. I got in. “Who belongs to this?”
    “Smooth,” my father said. “He needs a big car. His wife makes him sleep in it half the time.”
    “He doesn’t strike me as an easy guy to be married to.”
    “He’s okay. Just young and loaded with money