The Risk Pool

by informal invitation. “Jesus Christ,” Mike said. “We gotta do something, even if it’s wrong.”
    I knew how he felt. One of the last things my father had made me promise was that there’d be no funeral, no mass, no priest making up lies about him from a pulpit. I’d said sure, whatever he wanted, not thinking I’d have any trouble keeping such a promise. After all, who’d have expected Sam Hall to exit life by way of the altar? He hadn’t been inside a church in thirty years. Besides, there wasn’t even going to be a body—Albany Medical had dibs on that for up to two years. But now, like Mike, I couldn’t help thinking that we should do something, whether my father had wanted it or not. So I’d gone along with a “send-off” at The Elms. At least that way there was something to tell people who called wanting to know when and where the services were going to be.
    The only trouble was that now, having agreed, I didn’t feel up to it. I even gave passing consideration to the idea of just slipping quietly out of town. It was doubtful I’d ever return to Mohawk after today, doubtful too that I’d even be missed among my father’s cronies, most of whom had to be reminded who I was when we met on the street. The send-off looked to be the kind of obligation I could default on without meaningful consequence.
    “I wish I could get out of going myself,” I confessed to Wussy, thinking again of the semilegitimate justifications I might marshal in my own defense. Leigh had been having false labor pains for over a week. I could easily pretend to have received an urgent call. I could probably even talk Wussy into making my apologies for me. Perhaps because it would have been so easy, I decided not to act on the impulse.
    Wussy finished his sandwich and wadded up the cellophane. “You got here a couple minutes earlier I’d’ve shared that with you,” he said. “Now you’ll have to get your own.”
    “I need to go inside,” I told him. “The VA lost a form he signed.He must have figured they would and kept a copy. They can’t find his new glasses either.”
    “I happen to have a key,” he said, taking it off his chain.
    I started to ask why, then intuited the situation. They had not made up, Wussy and my father. If Wussy had a key, he had gotten it from Smooth, a master key, probably, that would get him into the other apartments, so he could do the work of the resident manager.
    We went inside the foyer and I inserted the key into the door of my father’s apartment, formerly the kindergarten of McKinley School. “I’ll be outside here if you need anything,” Wussy said, standing in the doorway as if he weren’t sure he’d been invited to follow. In fact, I didn’t think I could take any company. Not even his. I said I wouldn’t be long.
    “You been down to the bank yet?”
    I said I hadn’t. A week earlier my father had given me a check for just over two hundred dollars and made me promise to cash it before the bank froze his account. He was adamant that the electric company not get his last dime. Either Wussy knew about this too, or had guessed.
    “There isn’t much,” I told him, taking the check out of my wallet. “I was going to leave it there.”
    “You must not believe in ghosts,” Wussy said.
    “I don’t really want the money,” I said. “I doubt I’m even entitled to it.”
    “It’s up to you, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said. “Give it to Eileen. Sam Hall was a prince compared to the little moron she ended up marrying. If women didn’t always want to save people, they’d be perfect.”
    I handed him the check, which my father had predated and signed, but otherwise left blank. “I’ll leave it to your discretion,” I said. I almost suggested he keep it himself, since he’d no doubt earned it and a good deal besides during the last few weeks and down through the years, but I didn’t want to risk insulting his friendship. We looked around at my father’s apartment, Wussy still on the threshold.
    It took me all of two seconds to locate the other copy of the anatomical gift. In a last-minute uncharacteristic fit of organization, he’d left everything important in his upper righthand dresser drawer. Wussy, or somebody, had piled his three weeks’ worth of accumulated mail right there under the mirror, so I wentthrough it to make sure there wasn’t anything I’d need later. Most of it was junk. I opened an insurance company envelope marked IMPORTANT , which