I don’t know. “Cleaning my brushes.”
“Oh.” Noni poked her head out and rubbed her eyes. “Know something? I do believe that you, Benjamin Putter, are the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
“Me?”
“Yep, you. Goodnight, Benjamin Putter.”
“You can call me Ben.”
“I like using full names.”
“Then what’s yours?”
“Just Noni to you.”
“Fine. ’Night, Noni.”
I put my box away and curled up under a curve in the willow’s trunk, using my backpack for a pillow and sticking Daddy’s urn in the crook of my elbow. Tomorrow I’d be leaving my smallest of small towns in Alabama for the first time in my life, with my father’s cremation urn and a girl who was most likely trouble. Daddy used to call me a box turtle. Said I was more comfortable tucked in a shell than out in the world. He also used to say that a person who does magic tricks is suspect because you can’t trust anyone who keeps an animal in their hat. But maybe his view on things and on me would change with his death. Maybe mine would, too.
• • •
It seemed only a minute later that I woke up with my arm hugging Daddy and my head hugging dirt. Getting my bearings, I looked around for my backpack. Took me another minute until I saw it. Noni was beside the stream, sifting quietly through my bag down where the break in tree cover let the moon give her a little light. She pulled out the cash bills, and without glancing around, stuck them in her back pocket. Then she stood up, left the bag, and walked out of sight.
HOLE 8
I Can Be Bobby Jones
Teamwork, Daddy used to say. Golf is a solitary game that requires teamwork: The body, the mind, and the spirit all have to work together to produce an outcome. Those three things must touch each other and change each other and bleed together until they become focused on the same thing. It takes the Holy Trinity on your side, he’d say, then duck a swat from Mama. She hated when he blended golf and God together. She’d blush and say, Bogart, with that talk, you’re going straight to—and he’d scoop her up before she’d finish and kiss the last word away, and they’d twirl together for a minute and be their own trinity, just Mama and Daddy and whatever made them love each other.
I thought about that while I watched the person I’d stupidly trusted steal my money and leave me behind as the moon got its last moments in before dawn took over.
I could still hear Noni’s feet shuffling through the brush, but that was soon drowned out by my own heartbeat, beating out its shocked see that, did you see that, pounding out its angry, big-eyed thief, she’s a big-eyed thief, or maybe just banging out repeated rounds of leavin’ you again, someone’s leavin’ you again. It’s hard to tell what a fierce heartbeat is saying, even for me.
“Come on, Daddy.” I scooped him up and scooted down to the creek.
She’s only stealing what you already stole, said the backpack. “Not helpful,” I told it, sticking Daddy inside and slipping it over my arms.
Noni wasn’t too far away, and soon I saw her, paused at the other side of the creek, her head tilted up while she looked at the moon and chewed on a long piece of the wheatgrass that grew near the water. I couldn’t help but watch her. She looked like a girl stuck in a painting, thinking about secrets that you’d never find out. After a while, a determined expression settled on her face where an unreadable one had been a minute before, and she walked off, straight through the trees and brush.
I was too thrown off to yell. Instead, I crossed the stream at another low spot, followed her to the back of the Hilbert property, and watched her skip straight to a clothesline hung with a variety of pants, shirts, and dresses.
After studying the possibilities, she chose a long-sleeved light blue dress with pockets that I’d seen Ginny Hilbert wear at school, yanked it down, then scooted into the Hilbert’s henhouse. She came out shortly after, dress on, her old clothes under one arm and her pockets bulging. With her free hand, she found a good-size rock and stuck a number of bills on their back porch using the rock’s weight to hold them down. On her way back into the woods, she picked up a small metal bucket and hissed as she passed by the bush I crouched behind, laughing when I jumped.
“Glad you’re awake, scaredy-cat,” she said. “It’ll save us time. Change into a different shirt—yours is all tore up.” She turned her back on me and waved a little circle in the air. “Go on. Switch clothes.”
I looked down at my chest. “It got ripped on the fence.” I changed into another shirt, adding the ruined one to the Hilberts’ burn pile. “You can turn around now.”
She faced me and nodded. “Tuck it in when we get to the station. People’ll think you’re a runaway or something. Don’t argue. We should look at least halfway nice for the bus ride. I’m wearing a dress, and I never wear dresses. Take off that backpack so I can put my old clothes in there.”
“You stole my money.” I pointed to the long-sleeved, button-down shirt in her hands. “You probably stole that, too.”
“This shirt was my daddy’s, if you need to know.” She pointed to the lumps in her pockets. “And I didn’t steal the money, I wanted some eggs. Haven’t had any since . . . Well, it’s been a while. I saw those chickens pecking around their yard last night when I went exploring a little. I was coming back for you.”
“Sounds like a lie,” Daddy said.
I wasn’t sure I believed her either. “How come you took all my money with you?”
“Our money, Benjamin Putter. You and me are in this together.” She tapped the backpack and unzipped it, pushing her clothes inside. “Along with your daddy in there. Now, I’m happy to help you, but I had a serious hankering for eggs.”
“How are we supposed to cook them?”
She swung the bucket an inch from my nose. “This maybe. Haven’t figured it out yet for sure, but they’ll keep.”
Daddy let something out like a growl. “Get that money back, Ben.”
“Gimme my money back,” I told her.
She pulled it from a pocket and handed it over. “Our money. Don’t be greedy. Which way to Heart?”
I pointed north. “We hop on a road up there a ways and then follow it straight east.”
“Well, let’s get going. Say, what do you want for a name?”
“What?”
“You know, in case we have to say who we are.”
I thought. “Bobby Jones.”
Daddy laughed. “Gimme a quote, son!”
Without thinking, I recited his favorite. “Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots, but you have to play the ball where it lies.” Inwardly, I gave myself a kick. Try as I might to ignore them, all of Daddy’s fact speeches and golfer quotes had been planted into me against my will and had settled in like golf-happy brain ticks, burrowing into my mind so deep that I’d never get them out.
Noni looked at me a little funny. “Good to know, crazy. I’ll be Betsy Jones.”
We walked north on a dirt road, and I watched Hilltop fade behind us as we cut across a tobacco field to a crossroad. Daddy was mumbling about something, so I hung back a good ways to listen to him while Noni walked ahead. It was still dark out, but the sky was getting a little lighter. We had maybe a two hour walk to Heart.
“Something’s tricky about that one, Ben. Can’t trust a runaway.”
It was strange that she seemed so eager to hop onto my trip. And Daddy was right. There was something about her that made me think she’d be leaving me sooner rather than later. Hopefully not with the money. “I’m a runaway, too.”
“But you’ve got a purpose. You’re on a road trip with your old man. Just the two of us, spending quality time together.” His invisible hand reached out to smack me on the back. “You and me, going to Augusta National Golf Club, can you believe it?” Ashy hands rubbed together with glee inside his urn. “And the Masters. I’m getting teary-eyed just thinking about
it. We’ll be right there with Hobart Crane for a whole tournament. He’s my favorite.”
Unless there was a bus straight to Augusta, the chances of us watching Hobart Crane play the whole tournament weren’t good. But I didn’t want to bother him with that detail just yet. “I know, Daddy.”
“Hobart grew up in a small town, just like me and you. Poor boy playing at the Masters. There’s a dream to shoot for, right? I doubt that girl even knows the name ‘Hobart Crane.’ ”
Noni was far ahead now, slapping her sides like she was keeping rhythm to something. “Maybe she has a purpose, too.” I thought about how she’d looked back at the creek, her head tilted up at the moon. I thought about how she was trusting me for some reason. “Let’s just get to Heart.”
I’d only been to Heart once. Daddy’s brother, Uncle Luke, had traveled from Georgia to visit about two months back. He’d called on the telephone to talk to Daddy now and then, but I’d never met my uncle until the day when we’d all gone out to meet his bus at the station. That was right after Daddy found out he was real sick for the second time. Luke was a golfer, too, and had made it three years on the professional tour, but never qualified for the Masters before his back got hurt and his career ended. He’d taken a job at a public course in Georgia as consolation.
He and Daddy spent seven whole days cooking barbecue for customers, hitting balls behind the café, drinking too much, quoting old players like they were disciples, and trading facts about their favorite current player. Hobart Crane was a humble, hardworking man who persevered through tragedy, Luke’d said, clinking beer bottles out by the smoker. A man’s man, who didn’t give up on life even when he had a darn good reason to, Daddy’d said, clinking back.
Cheers to Hobart, cheers to his poor, long-since-passed-away wife and his poor newly-passed-away daughter, and cheers to the Big Five. Cheers to Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and Ben Hogan. I didn’t hear my name come up when they were drinking to things. That’s around the time I started noticing that something was stuck in my throat, though I didn’t realize that it was a golf ball until after Daddy died.
“Hey, Daddy? How come you haven’t said anything about Uncle Luke? He’s in Georgia. Maybe he could help.” The last day Uncle Luke was with us, he and Daddy had a terrible fight. Woke me up in the middle of the night with the yelling and pounding and breaking of things. The next morning Mama drove Uncle Luke to the bus station, and I hadn’t heard his name mentioned since. But it didn’t make much sense to hold a grudge in purgatory.
“He’s right in Augusta. You know that. And we’re not getting help from him. You hear me? You stay away from Luke.”
“Yes, sir.” I knew that voice. That was his shut-down voice. It had an edge and a warning in it not to push him. I wondered where he’d gotten that voice from and if I’d inherit that from him along with his looks.
“Hey, don’t you get quiet on me, son,” Daddy said. “I know that tone in your voice. That’s your ‘I’m giving up on you’ voice. You’ve got more fight in you than that, don’t you? Don’t go getting upset when people talk hard to you, your father included. You curl up like a flower at night the second you get told something you don’t want to hear, boy.”
He’s right, said a crow flying overhead. That’s just what you do.
“Why don’t you tell me something about yourself,” Daddy said. “It takes an awful lot out of me to talk.”
I stopped walking. The golf ball in my throat got real heavy. Who has a father who says something like “Tell me about yourself,” like they were strangers instead of part of each other? Then again, I couldn’t recall my daddy ever asking me to tell him anything other than what he’d already taught me.
“Okay.”
My childhood was flooded with names of golfer people I didn’t give a flip about, so I figured I’d do him a favor and skip over names. I didn’t think he’d want to hear about nice Miss Stone and mean Mr. Underwood and pretty Erin Courtney. I didn’t tell him how my best friend was May Talbot, or at least she had been, or how there was an unofficial Negro lunch table at our school, or how May had spoken little since she started coming to Hilltop Primary and even less since Mr. Talbot’s barbecue business burned to the ground around the time Bobby Jones died last December. I didn’t tell him that I’d been mourning someone important, too, or how part of me knew it was my fault that I’d lost her.
I didn’t think he’d noticed that I never hung around with Bill Sweeney or Davey Burr or John Conner anymore, since they were all at the private school now. Their parents didn’t want them mixing with me anymore. I stopped by to play when I saw them all over at Davey’s house one day, but Bill shook his head and pointed at me to go home. I might have colored germs on me from staying at the integrated school, he’d said.
And I knew for a fact Daddy wouldn’t want to know the names I’d been called for talking to myself and drawing pictures of trees outside school windows.
So I told him about how some boy had brought a salamander to school and put it right on a teacher’s head, and the teacher didn’t even notice because she had so much hairspray on. I told him how the halls and classrooms were less crowded this year, how the girls’ bathroom toilet overflowed one day and flooded the hallway, and how the principal, Mr. Bottom, had come in one day to find his office covered in toilet paper.
He chuckled a few times and didn’t once interrupt to tell me how the legendary golfer Bobby Jones had said that some people think they’re concentrating when they’re really worrying or how golf was the greatest game in the history of the world or how you can’t hit too slow or too fast on the putting green or how a man’s patience with a dead pig meant more than his patience with boring conversation.
He just listened. When he did talk, his voice sounded farther away. Weary. He asked me how far we were from Augusta and told me he’d better rest up. Then Daddy didn’t speak again and my only close company was the lump in my throat. I had the strangest feeling that I’d imagined him talking in the first place. Or maybe listening to me talk was exhausting to him. Maybe that’s why he didn’t do it much when he was alive.
“Hey, crazy!” Noni waved from fifty yards ahead. The dirt had changed to pavement somewhere along the way, and we’d reached Heart. She grinned and pointed to the BUS DEPOT sign far down the street. “You ever been to Georgia?”
I shook my head and jogged a little to catch up to her. I’d never been anywhere outside of Hilltop, other than Heart and Mobile.
“Well, Bobby Jones,” she said, slapping an arm around my back, “I haven’t either. But I bet it’s pretty enough to scatter ashes on.”
HOLE 9
Painting Tickets
A clock read six o’clock in the morning when Noni and I walked inside. The big indoor room held benches and a ticket booth and smelled like a combination of cleaning supplies and body odor. Posters for destination cities plastered the walls. We found the water fountain, a rusty piece of metal nailed to the wall that dribbled liquid even when nobody was there to drink it. Only after taking a sip did I notice the ghost letters above it, barely visible under a layer of paint. The entire wall was covered in the same white as the rest of the station, but you could see what else used to be there.
The word COLORED was hidden for the most part, but I could still see it. I bent to take one more sip of water, then moved to let Noni have some. While she drank, I noticed a cleaner-looking fountain attached to the opposite end of the station.
A uniformed maintenance worker shuffled over to the side door of the ticket office. I heard a low murmur of tired voices. A few people were scattered around the benches, reading or staring sleepily at the air in front of them.
“Hey,” I said to Noni. “You never said where you’re from. Is there a chance anybody here might recognize you?”
She nudged me toward the wall map, and I caught her studying her reflection in the clear plastic covering it. She tugged at her long ponytail. “No. I’m a nobody now.”
Blue, green, and red lines spread from the town of Heart like veins in the body of America. “We could go to Chicago or New York if we wanted,” I said in wonder. I studied the map again. “Okay, Birmingham, Montgomery, Atlanta, or Chattanooga. Those are all in the right direction, for the most part.”
“Atlanta,” Daddy said, sounding confident. “Watch the station until you see an older lady, then go up to the ticket taker and tell him she’s your grandma. Tell him you were just having a visit with Granny, and now you’re buying a ticket home to your parents.”
It sounded a little far-fetched to me. “Daddy says we should buy a ticket to Atlanta. He said to attach ourselves to an old person and the ticket person will sell us the tickets, no questions.”
Noni eyed the urn in my arms with a look of approval I hadn’t earned from her yet. “Smart man, that dead daddy of yours. I’ll just tell the ticket taker that our granny lets me buy the tickets because I get a kick out of it. But we don’t have enough money to get to Atlanta.”
I studied the fare rate. “Says thirty-five dollars per person. Half that for kids. We’ve got plenty.”
“Not after I left some for the eggs and clothes.”
“How much did you leave?”
She shrugged. “Most of the clothes hanging on that line didn’t look so good. I figured they needed extra.”
The Hilberts had eight kids and could use all the extras they could get. “You’re right about that, but you had no right to—”
“We’re five dollars short. Don’t worry, though. Just follow my lead.” She walked toward a little white-haired woman who’d come through the front station door.
The lady fingered a cross necklace hanging around her neck and looked repeatedly at the station clock. She had no bags, other than a light brown purse.
“Follow me,” Noni murmured. “And let me do the talking.” She walked right up to the woman, gripping my shirt and yanking me along. She gave the woman a big smile. “Hello, ma’am. Who’re you waiting for?”
Waiting for Augusta Page 5