by Otto Penzler
If I’m being honest, I was looking for a loophole.
My last hope was, we wouldn’t get a tee time. But we did: early morning, right after breakfast. The format was simple: each team member took a turn at hitting his team’s ball. We also agreed to make it the best of nine holes rather than the full eighteen. Big John teed off for his side, the Boss for ours. As they walked down the fairway afterward, the Boss asked Big John where he was berthed.
“Rented a beautiful big house just outside town. All services provided. How about you?”
“The Old Course Hotel.”
“What’s it like?”
“Pretty good.”
“I’m sure it is,” Big John said, his tone almost adding the words “for a hotel.”
Pete took the second stroke and overhit it. That was when we decided he should maybe tee off at the second hole.
When my turn came, I had to chip onto the green, but rolled it right off again and into a bunker.
“Just as well we’re playing hole by hole,” Mike hissed at me afterward as we walked to the second tee. “We lost that one by three strokes.”
By dint of a massive tee shot from Pete, we managed to draw the next hole. Then at the third, Manolito, who was losing more interest in the game the farther we moved from the town’s female population, put the ball into some deep rough, from which it took Big John’s players two more strokes to get it back onto the fairway. Although we took three putts, we still won by a single stroke, Big John’s own massive saving putt stopping about an inch and a half from the hole.
It was all square as we walked to the fourth. “Still shooting pool?” Buck asked me. I nodded. “Then it’s just as well it’s golf we’re playing.”
I smiled. “How about you, Buck? Life treating you fair?”
“It’s tough all over,” he said. But I knew it wasn’t. Miami didn’t have the same problems Boston did. Big John had made peace with the Cubans. This had allowed him certain avenues of diversification. First time my boss and Big John had met, they’d done so in a state of parity, a state which could no longer be said to exist.
Blue played a spectacular 3-iron at the fourth. I knew the clubs now, thanks to a long night with the pro. I could even use them, in a rudimentary fashion. But if Pete’s deficiency was his inability to hit the ball at anything short of full power, then mine was more a matter of accuracy deficiency. That ball… it seemed to have a mind of its own, I swear. A putt of fifteen feet ended up curving away from the hole until it came to rest nine or ten feet to the left of where I’d been aiming.
“It’s called the run of the green,” Buck told me between holes. “A local caddie, someone who’s played the course all his life, they know it like they know the creases, slopes and hangs of their wife’s body.”
That’s when I knew Big John’s team hadn’t spent the previous night with a pro, but with a caddie…
We drew the fourth, lost the fifth and sixth. Buck had an elegant, easy swing, which I tried copying until Mike hissed that I looked like I was auditioning for Fred Astaire. Mike himself hadn’t played a bad stroke yet, said something about teaching Tiger Woods everything he knew, then made the slightest adjustment to his leather driving glove.
When we won the seventh, it was in part because a cell phone went off just as Blue was taking his shot. The cell belonged to Big John, so they could hardly complain when Blue sliced his stroke and the ball got lost in more thick rough. The wind was growing stronger, and our tactic of having Pete tee off was beginning to lose efficacy. The problem was, he hit the ball too high, where the wind caught it and toyed with it, sending it literally off course. But at the eighth we were saved by another glorious shot from Mike, who took a 4-iron into the rough and brought the ball out and in a nice line with the pin. Manolito, meantime, had contrived to find a stream which, according to Mike, shouldn’t have been a problem until the back nine. So they dropped a shot, and Buck had to play across the line of a foursome who were on their way home. They looked like locals to me, and just shook their heads. They’d probably seen lousier shots in their time, and maybe worse etiquette, too.
It ended up all square as we went to the ninth.
“Just the way I like my baseball,” I told Buck.
“Except when it’s the Red Sox, right?”
I couldn’t disagree with him there.
The Boss hit a sweet tee shot, then reached into the pocket of the golf bag and brought out a pakamac. The rain was coming down now. Someone had once told me they did most of their business on the golf course. Well, that’s what we were doing out there, too. No place for small talk. My own short exchanges with Buck had earned frowns from both captains.
Pete, despite our encouragement, hit the ball another mighty swipe which sent it sailing past the green and off to the right. Somehow he missed two bunkers and left Mike a manageable chip, which he decided to take with an 8-iron. It landed sweetly about three feet from the hole, but the ball had arranged for some spin, and rolled back a further five or so feet. An eight-foot putt. Buck, meantime, had putted to within four feet of the hole, only to watch Big John’s tap-in roll around the lip of the cup and pop back out again.
So instead of putting to save the match, suddenly I had a chance to win it. An eight-foot putt in the wind and rain, here on the Old Course at St. Andrews. There was no pressure on me, no pressure at all. The pin was already out. I walked around the other side of the hole and crouched down, measured the line with my putter, the way I’d seen it done. Then back around to my ball again, crouching again, closing one eye to peer at the lie of the green, those curves and slopes… And something happened. The closer I got to the ground, the easier the putt looked. They started laughing at me as I angled my head, my hair getting wet as it touched the shorn grass.
“He going to knock it in with his nose or what?” Big John asked.
I got up again, brushed myself off and smiled back at him. “It’s regarded as good manners to keep silent during a player’s stroke,” I recited.
“Why, you little punk…”
But the others could see that I had a point. Blue touched his boss on the arm, and Big John quieted, grinning a wider grin when he remembered that he was about to win. Me, I just looked at Buck and gave him a wink, then got down on my knees behind the ball, shimmying back until I could stretch out full length. I turned the putter around and imagined the golf ball was a straight black into the center pocket, the putter’s rubberized grip a freshly chalked cue tip. I slid it back and forth a few times, until it felt right in my hands. Adjusted my elbow ever so slightly…
Big John was complaining now, his voice rising. I ignored him, ignored everything but the pot. Hit the ball cleanly and watched it roll into the cup. As I got to my feet, there was laughter. Mike was patting me on the back. The Boss was clapping. Pete sent one of the clubs spinning dangerously through the air.
I walked across to where Big John was still scowling, still yelling that I was a goddamned cheat.
“Look at the rules,” I said. “Or ask a good caddie.”
Then I went back to my team to celebrate.
Of course, by the time we’d finished that round, Wilma and Freddy, as I’d thought they might, had fled: just packed their things and gone. They’d turn up sooner or later, I didn’t doubt, once the dust had settled.
We were due to leave before dawn next morning: the long drive back to the airport. But that didn’t stop us partying into the wee sma’ hours: champagne and malt whiskey, old stories and even a couple of songs. The Boss looked at me with new respect, and I got the feeling maybe I was about to graduate to something better… When I woke up, Pete was standing by the window, just staring out at the dark and silent world. No sodium glare, no sirens.
“You okay, old pal?” I asked him.
“Never better,” he assured me.
Next time I awoke, he was gone. We drove out of St. Andrews without him. There was no question of us hanging around, looking for him. The Boss wanted to get back h
ome and start spreading the word about the game. Besides, as I tried to explain, I didn’t think Pete wanted to be found. There was a lot of world out there for him to explore. Me, I had a warm pool table waiting, and maybe a story of my own to tell.
LUCY HAD A LIST
John Sandford
This was the way you won the Open.
This was the way you won a million dollars.
This is what you did.
Lucy had a list, and she was sticking to it.
Every morning, in the back bedroom, braced on the tinny, oil-canning floor, looking into a full-length mirror she’d bought at the Wal-Mart, Lucy did a hundred grips and a hundred turns. She’d grip the club and check alignment, start the turn and check her intermediate position in the mirror. When she was satisfied, she’d continue, let her wrists cock, hold at the top and check the final position. Then she’d start over.
She was on the eighty-fourth turn when the screaming started. The screaming didn’t affect the drill. Strange sounds came off a golf course, and besides, she’d do a hundred reps if the trailer burned down around her. At ninety-nine she hadn’t even paused to look out the blinds.
On her hundredth turn, she checked her form in the mirror, nodded at herself and relaxed. She was a middle-sized girl, lean from walking and working out, deeply tanned, dishwater blonde with a pixie cut. She was sweating a little, and wiped the side of her nose on her shirtsleeve. She was dressed in a navy-blue golf shirt and khaki shorts, with a Ping golf hat. Her blond ponytail was threaded through the back of the hat.
She put the weighted club in the corner of the bedroom and walked down the central hall to the kitchen. Her mom was digging in a toaster with a fork, talking to it around a lit Marlboro, letting it know: “You piece of shit-ass junk, you let that outta there.”
By some mistake, the television was turned off, so the screaming outside sounded even louder than it had in the back. Mom, still talking sticky-lipped around the cigarette, glanced sideways at the screen door and said, “Goddamned golfers,” and turned the toaster upside down and banged it on the counter.
Lucy looked out through the screen, across the six-foot strip of grass that served as the front yard, past the corner of the Tobins’ double-wide and over the fence, across the end of the driving range and the east corner of the machine shed, and judged the screams as coming from the first fairway. “Don’t sound like drunks,” she said. She corrected herself. “Doesn’t.”
“Yeah, well, fuck ’em anyway,” Mom said. Lucy’s mother knew about golfers, having had a number of hasty relationships with them over the years, including one with Lucy’s father. Lucy knew little about him except that he was a 6-handicap and, under pressure, had a tendency to flip his hands at the beginning of his downswing.
“Duck-hooked me right into the county maternity ward,” her mother told her. “Not that I didn’t love you every minute, sweetheart.”
Lucy would have liked to know more, but never would. She had two photographs of him, taken with a small camera, reds and greens in the photos starting to bleed: her mom and dad in their golf clothes, standing near the ball machine on the driving range, squinting at the camera, sunlight harsh on their faces. Her father had been murdered by a man named Willis Franklin, who at that very moment was probably sitting on a barstool at the Rattlesnake Golf Club, not five hundred yards away, having gotten away with it.
“How did this happen?” her mother asked, peering into the toaster. “That sonofabitch is welded in there.”
“I told you, you cannot put frozen flapjacks in a toaster; it don’t work,” Lucy said. “When they thaw out they get sticky and they sink down and grab ahold of them little wires at the bottom… Ah, shit.” She was tired of hearing herself talk about it; and a little tired of correcting her own grammar. She did it anyway: “Doesn’t work,” she said. “Those little wires.”
Her mom looked up: “You been pretty goddamn prickly lately.”
“I’m headin’ out; see what’s going on,” Lucy said. She rattled through the golf bags stacked in the corner and pulled out her putter.
“Dinner at 5:30,” Mom said.
“Yeah.” Like it made any difference what time they fired up the microwave. “I’ll be back before then, probably for lunch. I got a couple of lessons; then I gotta run into town.”
Lucy took her putter, which she called the Lizard, and stuck five balls in the pocket of the golf vest she’d designed herself and produced on Mom’s pedal-driven Singer—a sports-activity vest that sooner or later would be stolen by those sonsofbitches at Nike, she didn’t doubt, and somebody would make a million bucks, but it wouldn’t be her. She went out the door, the Lizard over her shoulder, the new Titleists clicking in her vest pocket. On the step, she automatically touched her pocket again, didn’t feel the book. “Shoot.”
She went back inside: “Forgot my list,” she said.
“Heaven forbid,” Mom said. She’d given up on the toaster and was looking through the litter in the kitchen for her Marlboros. “Got to clean this place up,” she muttered.
Lucy went back to the bedroom, got the little black book from the dresser and headed out again, out the door, past the Tobins’ place, through a hole in the fence and past the machine shed, where Donnie Dell was poking around the mower blades on an aging orange Kubota tractor. He called, “Hiya, Luce,” and she raised the putter and called back, “What’s all the hollerin’ about?”
He shook his head: “I don’t know. Too early to be drunks.” She kept going and he called after her, “You gonna be around?”
“Maybe tonight,” she called back. “Right now, I got a lesson with Rick Waite and his wife.”
“Okay. Maybe, uh, I’ll stop by. Later.”
She smiled and kept moving. Donnie Dell was taking some kind of ag course over at UW-River Falls; a college boy. She knew exactly what he wanted; he’d been coming around for a month, ever since he got hired. What he didn’t know, but that she did, was that he was going to get some, but not for a week. That’s when he came up on her list, and she’d hold to it.
But tonight, tomorrow, the next day—uh-uh. She was busy.
She was passing the end of the machine shed, heading toward the putting green, when she saw one of the Prtussin brothers trotting down the first fairway. The sight stopped her. Dale Prtussin was forty-five years old and weighed upwards of 250 pounds. None of it was muscle, and seeing him run was like watching a swimming pool full of Jell-O in an earthquake. He’d once eaten one of his own salads and come down with food poisoning. The major symptom was projectile vomiting and she’d seen him walk to the john in midspasm.
Up the fairway, at the top of the hill, just shy of the 185-yard marker, a half dozen golfers were gathered around the sand trap that guarded the inside elbow of the dogleg. They were all looking into the trap. Lucy went that way, twirling the putter like a baton.
One of the golfers, an older guy named Clark who always pretended to be taking an avuncular interest while he peered down her blouse, frowned when he saw her coming, held out a hand, and said, “This isn’t for you, young lady.”
“Don’t make me hurt ya,” Lucy said, pointing the putter handle at his gut. Harley Prtussin said, “Howya, Luce?” as she came up and looked in the sand trap. The first thing she saw was the ball that somebody had driven into the lip of the bunker; then she saw the nose in the divot.
“Holy shit,” she said. She was gawking. “What’s that?”
“Stevie,” Prtussin said.
“Stevie? Is he dead?” All right, that was stupid. “How’d he get in there? Who found him?”
“Somebody must’ve put him in,” the avuncular golfer said.
A golfer named Joe said, “I found him. Swung at my ball and felt the club hang up; I guess, Jesus… I guess it was his nose.”
She looked again at the ball in the lip of the bunker. “What’d you use, a 7-iron?”
“Yeah.” They all looked down toward the green.
“Never gonna clear that
lip from there with a 7-iron, not with your ball flight,” Lucy said.
“I played it a little forward in my stance,” Joe said.
“Good thing,” Prtussin said. “If you’d dug in hard with a wedge, you’da really fucked up his face.”
They all looked back in the hole where Stevie’s nose stuck up, like a picture of the Great Pyramid taken from Skylab. One of the golfers shook his head and said, “Boy,” and another one said, “Not something you see every day.”
Prtussin said to Joe, “After you’re done here, come on back to the clubhouse and I’ll give you a rain check.”
“You closing the course?”
“No, no…” Couldn’t do that.
“Well, I’ll just go on…”
“I think the cops are gonna want to talk to you, Joe.”
Joe scratched his head and looked down toward the first green. Nothing but blue sky and light puffy clouds and maybe a one-mile-an-hour wind. The fairway was freshly mowed and smelled like spring golf “Ah, heck. You think?”
They all stood around looking at the nose, and then a cop car turned in the drive, stopped for a minute at the end of the parking lot, so the driver could talk to Dale Prtussin, who’d just come out of the clubhouse. Dale got in the backseat and the car bucked over the curb and headed up the hill through the rough.
The nose sticking out of the sand looked austere, Lucy thought, plucking a word from her pre-sleep vocab list. White and semiplastic. Like a priest’s nose when the priest is pissed off at you. The cop car rolled up and Jamie Forester got out of the car, hatless, remembered Dale in the back, popped the back door, and they both got out and Jamie said, “Everybody move back.”