The Risk Pool

what I have never regretted doing. I got him his clothes and helped him into them. There weren’t enough holes in his belt, so we had to tie it in a knot to keep his pants up. He swam in everything else, too, and by the time we were finished, he looked like nothing so much as a pile of discarded clothing awaiting a Salvation Army truck.
    “Now,” he said. “Go steal me a wheelchair … strap that mask on before you leave.”
    And so I did, suddenly right in the spirit of things, as if by sneaking out of the hospital, we could sneak away from the disease. It was an ability he had right to the end, to involve me in any lunacy, by the sheer force of his will. So off I went in search of a wheelchair, as instructed, delighted to be of service, wondering only vaguely if I was doing something I could be prosecuted for later. It took me about five minutes to locate a wheelchair on an adjacent ward. By the time I returned with it, he had leaned back against the wall to rest, his booted feet up on the bed in front of him.
    He was fast asleep, the only visible sign of life the clouding, then clearing of his oxygen mask. He slept peacefully there until a nurse, the same one he’d asked about the spoon, came in, stopped dead in her tracks, assessed the situation at a glance and began undressing him. She was nearly finished when he woke up.
    “You again,” he said.
    “Me again,” she admitted.
    “This is my son,” he said. “He’s all right … not like his old man.”
    “He looks just like you,” she said.
    When she was gone, my father pointed toward the painting on the wall. “See?” he said. “Now the wagon’s on the left.”
    “Yes,” I said. “It is.”
    “How’d he do that?” my father wanted to know, as if he’d die a happy man if I could explain it to him. I couldn’t tell whether he meant the artist or the man driving the wagon, and I hadn’t the heart to tell him that the wagon had been on the left side of the road all along, that it hadn’t moved since the last time we’d looked at it, that the picture was just a cheap print, unworthy of his attention when there were so many things to say, things that wouldn’t get said if we didn’t say them soon.
    But we sat there, my father and I, and stared at the wagon and the old covered bridge and the snow and the ice skaters and the frozen river, as if these were at the very heart of things, and had been forever.

EPILOGUE
    At the airport I rented a car and took it onto the Thruway to avoid Albany, a gray city on the best of days, and this was not the best of days.
    The VA was on the other side of town at the end of a long treeless drive, a tall building, stark and massive and undeniable as death. I parked the rental at the base of a recently plowed mountain of dingy snow and went inside. I’d been told I would have trouble locating room 135, but it was right where it should have been. A woman with a name plate that corresponded to what I had jotted down the morning before when the call came telling me of Sam Hall’s death was standing in the office doorway, carrying on a conversation with another woman in full retreat down the corridor. “Did you get through to North Carolina?”
    The woman slowed, as if on an invisible leash, but continued to strain in the direction she was heading. “I got the sister-in-law. The brother is supposed to call when he gets home from work. I have my doubts.”
    “Get some ice on the eyes just in case,” said my woman, who became aware of me in midsentence.
    “Nice job you’ve got,” I said.
    “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said, risking a half smile.
    “Couldn’t be,” I said, introducing myself.
    “Oh,” she said seriously. “Mr. Hall.”
    For some reason I remembered a gag used by good ole boys and politicians. “No, Mr. Hall’s my father. My name’s Ned.” I almost used it.
    The woman’s office was little more than a carrel with a small metal desk along one wall and several hundred brown packages, all one size, stacked all the way to the ceiling in one corner. “I’mafraid I’m going to have to ask you to sign a release,” she said. “We still can’t find the anatomical gift form.”
    I read the first sentence of the release and signed.
    “According to your father, there was another copy. Do you think you could locate it?” she said, as if she suspected, now that she thought about it, that my signature wasn’t likely to hold up.
    “I’ll try.”
    “That’s all any of