by Otto Penzler
Everybody took a step back and he looked in the trap, nodded, said, “Everybody stay back.” He had his hands on his hips, looked at the nose for another five seconds, then shook his head and said, “Man-oh-man,” walked back to the car and called in.
Mitchell Drury arrived five minutes later. Drury was a member of the club and the lead investigator for the St. Croix County sheriff’s office. Half the people around the bunker said, “Hey, Mitch,” when he got out of his brown Dodge. He looked around, then said to Forester, “Everybody who wasn’t here when he was found, get them out of here.” To Dale Prtussin, “You and Harley better stay.” He caught Lucy’s eye, showed a half inch of grin and said, “Heard about the Ladies’. Congratulations.”
Lucy nodded, and Drury turned back to the sand trap, all business again. Forester shooed them all away from the trap and back down the fairway to the first tee. At the bottom of the hill, Wade McDonnell, a retired mailman who worked as a ranger, was waving people off the tee. When Lucy went past, he asked, “They take him out yet?”
“Nope. Can’t see nothing but the nose.” She corrected herself “Anything but the nose.” The Businesswoman’s One-Minute Guide to English Grammar and Usage.
“You taking off?” McDonnell asked.
“Got the Waites.”
McDonnell looked sympathetic. “Good luck.”
“That ain’t gonna help,” Lucy said. Corrected herself: “Isn’t going to help. Rick’s got the reflexes of a fuckin’ clam.” Thought about deleting the fuckin’, but decided to let it be; that was just golf talk.
The Waites were unloading their fly-yellow Mustang when Lucy came up, and wanted to know what was going on; and then both of them had to walk up to the first tee to look up the hill and bitch at McDonnell about not being able to go on up to the bunker to look at the nose.
“It’s a free goddamn country,” Rick Waite argued.
“Tell that to Mitchell Drury,” McDonnell said.
“Fuck a bunch of Mitchell Drurys,” Waite said.
“Tell that to Mitchell Drury,” McDonnell answered.
More cops arrived and drove up the rough to the trap; then a panel van from the St. Croix County medical examiner’s office. Everybody from the bar was milling around the first tee by that time; and as players came off the ninth green and eighteenth, they joined the crowd.
Then nothing happened for a long time, the crowd waiting in the sunshine and the vanishing morning dew—always a few of them bleeding off to the bar, returning with beers and rum-Cokes. Lucy wandered off to the practice green, pushed a white tee into the ground three feet from one edge, and began practicing lag putts across the width of the green. Sixteen of twenty had to stop past the hole, but not further than seventeen inches past. Twenty minutes later, Rick Waite came over, his wife trailing, and said, “Might as well do that lesson,” and Sharon Waite said, “Dale told us you shot a 68 up at Midland Hills in the Minnesota Ladies’.”
Lucy said, “It shoulda been a 67, but I lost discipline on number 8 and three-putted.”
“That happens to everybody,” Sharon Waite said.
“Fuckin’ shouldn’t,” Lucy said.
“But you won going away,” Waite persisted.
“The Ladies’ isn’t the Tour,” Lucy said. “They don’t give you that stroke on the Tour.” She turned away, and behind her back, Sharon Waite looked at her husband and shook her head.
Halfway through the lesson, Lucy told Rick Waite that “Your biggest problem, you’re sliding your hips. Every time you go to swing, you slide your hips to the right. Then you got to slide them back to the left, for the club to come down at the same place that it started. That’s too hard. You gotta rotate your hips instead of slidin’ ’em. Like you’re standin’ in a barrel.”
She demonstrated, but Waite shook his head. “I can’t feel that,” he said. “I gotta feel that before I remember it. Gimme a tip that’ll make me feel it.”
Lucy looked at him for a minute; behind him, his wife—who was a better natural golfer than her husband, but didn’t much care for the game—shook her head.
“I’ll give you a tip,” Lucy said. “When you set up, your dick is pointing at the ball. Keep it pointing at the ball. If you rotate, it’ll point at the ball. If you slide, it’ll point at your right shoe. Think you can feel that?”
Behind him, Waite’s wife was biting the inside of her cheeks to keep from laughing. Waite looked at his shoe and said, “Shit, honey, my dick is usually pointing at my left kneecap.” His wife made a rude noise.
From the range, they could see up the hill to the crowd around the sand trap. People—cops—were crawling around the trap, and then a couple of guys hauled a black bag out of it. “Body bag,” Rick Waite said.
“Poor old Stevie,” Sharon Waite said. “Must’ve put it in the wrong place one time too many.” Her eyes cut to Lucy: “Don’t mind my mouth, honey.”
“No big deal to me,” Lucy said. “Stevie and me didn’t get along all that well.” She caught herself: “Stevie and I,” she said.
The medical examiner’s van went by a minute later, but the cops stayed up on the hill. Lucy finished the lesson, got the twenty bucks from the Waites and walked back to the trailer, twirling the Lizard. Her mom was around to the side in a lawn chair with a reflector under her chin and a damp dishcloth over her eyes. “I’m taking the truck,” Lucy said. “Back in an hour.”
“Get some oranges at County Market,” Mom said. “Them real tart ones.”
“I’ll put it on my list,” Lucy said. She took the notepad out of her vest pocket, clicked the small ballpoint and added Oranges to her list for Tuesday.
Shamrock Real Estate was located on First Street in the town of Hudson, along the St. Croix River, in a flat cinder-block building that had been painted brown. Lucy parked in front and went in through the front door, the screen slapping behind her. The reception area smelled like nicotine, and held a desk, chair, computer and a beat-up faux-leather couch that might have been stolen from an airport lounge; there was nobody at the reception desk, and never was, because there’d never been a receptionist. Two small offices opened off the reception area. One was dark because nobody worked out of it. A light shone in the second, and Michael Crandon, who’d been reading a free paper with his feet up on his desk, leaned forward to see who’d come in.
“Me,” Lucy said, leaning in the office doorway.
“How you feeling?” Crandon asked. He dropped his feet to the floor. He was too old for it, but his brown hair was highlighted with peroxide and gelled up.
“You got it?” Lucy asked.
“You got the cash?”
She dug it out of her shorts pocket, a fold of bills: “Two hundred dollars.” She dropped it on the desk, as though she were buying chips in Vegas.
He handed her two amber pill bottles and a slip of paper. “Pills are numbered,” he said. “Take the big one the first day, the small one the second day. Read the instructions.”
“Better be good, for two hundred dollars,” Lucy said.
“They’re good.”
“Be back if they aren’t,” she said.
“Have I ever sold you any bad shit?”
Lucy shook her head: “You don’t want there to be a first time,” she said, her mouth shifting down to a grim line.
Crandon gave her his square-chinned grin; but he wasn’t laughing.
When she left the real estate office, she put the pill containers in the truck’s glove compartment and headed back up to Second Street and then out onto I-94, across the St. Croix Bridge into Minnesota, off at the first exit and south to the Lakeland library, which was in a strip shopping center a mile south of the exit. She parked in front of the post office, got a clipboard off the truck seat and carried it down to the library.
The library had a couple of small computers tucked away in the back. She brought one up, typed for a few minutes and printed out the paragraph. Then she took out a couple of rubber Finger Tips, the kind used by accountant
s and bank tellers, fitted them on her thumb and index finger, pulled the envelope out of the clipboard, printed that, wiped the screen and shut the computer down. Handling both the paper and the envelope with the Finger Tips, she slipped them back in the clipboard and carried them out to the car.
The town of River Falls was back across the St. Croix and another fifteen minutes south of Hudson. She drove on down, elbow out the window, the wind scrubbing the fine hair on her left forearm, past all the golf courses and cornfields and dairy farms and yuppie houses. She went straight to the post office, sealed the envelope using a corner of her shirt dampened with Chippewa spring water, stamped it with a self-sticking stamp and dropped it in the mailbox.
Looked in her book, at her list.
Good. Right on schedule.
Back home, Lucy put the oranges in the refrigerator; Mom yelled from the back of the trailer, “Lucy? That you?”
“Yeah.”
Mom came out of the back, her face wet, as though she’d been splashing water on it. “Why didn’t you tell me about Steve?”
“I figured you’d find out soon enough,” Lucy said. “Didn’t want to make you unhappy.”
“Jesus Christ, Lucy, I needed to know.” Her voice was coarse; she’d been crying.
“So you know,” Lucy said. “I got the oranges.”
“Jesus Christ, Luce…”
Lucy brushed past Mom and went into the bathroom, closed the door and looked at the two yellow pill bottles and the piece of paper. The paper carried handwritten instructions, which looked as though they’d been xeroxed about a hundred times. She read the instructions, then read them again, then opened one of the bottles, took out the pill, looked at it, bent over the sink, slurped some water from the faucet, then leaned back and popped the pill.
Everything would be better now. She flushed the toilet and went back out into the hall, could hear her mother in the bedroom; she might have been sobbing. “I’m taking my clubs,” Lucy called out.
Mom blubbered something, and Lucy picked up her clubs, then put them back down and went to the bedroom door and spoke at it.
“Can I come in?”
More blubbering, and she pushed the door open.
“I thought… I’m sorry, Mom, but I thought you were all done with that man.”
“Well, I was all done,” Mom said; her eyes had red circles around them. “Mostly. But I wouldn’t want that to come to him. Being killed like that.”
“Is there anything I can do about this? For you?”
“Naw, I’m just gonna sit around and cry for a couple of days. You go on.”
“I mean, you aren’t… pregnant or anything.”
Now a tiny smile: “I ain’t that stupid, honey. He never was a good bet.”
“All right.” Lucy nodded. “I’ll be back for dinner.”
The first fairway was empty, except for some yellow tape around the bunker. Lucy swerved away from the course and the practice green and crossed the driveway to the clubhouse. She dropped her bag in the office and looked out into the restaurant area. Jerry Wilhelm was sitting alone at the bar, smoking a cigarette and staring at a glass of beer; Perry, the bartender, was standing in the corner looking up at the TV, trying to tune it with a remote. Lucy drew herself a Diet Coke, then went around and slid up on a stool next to Wilhelm.
“You talk to the cops yet?” she asked.
“Waitin’ right now,” he said. “Mitch is downstairs with Carl Wallace.” He looked at the stairs that went down to the basement party room. “Jesus, Luce, you shoulda seen him when they took him out of that sand trap. Stevie. Like to blew my guts. He was all… gray.”
“Glad I didn’t see it,” she said, and tipped back the glass of Diet Coke.
“Rick Waite told me about your dick-pointing tip. You get that from Stevie?”
“Shoot no; the only way Stevie’s dick ever pointed was straight out.”
“How would you know about that?” Wilhelm asked.
“He used to tell me about it,” Lucy said. “Though I didn’t believe but half of what he said.”
“Shoulda believed about a quarter of it.”
“About old Satin Shorts? Guess you’d know about that.”
“Mary? Really? No, I didn’t hear that one.”
“Shoot, Jimmy, it was all over the club,” Lucy said. “Give me some of those peanuts, will ya?”
As Wilhelm pushed the bowl of complimentary peanuts at her, he said, “I thought him and your ma…”
“That was over two months ago.” Christ, they couldn’t think Mom did it? Of course they could, she thought—Mom and Stevie… “Two months ago… Where you been, boy?”
Wilhelm shrugged. “Working, I guess. Heard about your scholarship. You’re going to Florida?”
“Yup. I’ll give it two years anyway.”
“Well, good luck to ya. You’re the only person ever come out of this club might make it as a pro,” he said.
“I’m gonna try,” she said.
“It’s on your list?” Her lists were famous.
She finished the Diet Coke and touched her vest pocket: “Yup. It’s on my list,” she said. She pushed away and touched his shoulder. “Good luck with the cops; Mitch is a pretty good guy.”
“Thanks,” he said. She could feel his eyes on her ass as she walked away. Nothing to that, though. That was just normal. And the mission had been definitely accomplished.
If Lucy let it all out, held nothing back at all, and was hitting on a flat surface without wind, she could drive one of her Titleists three hundred yards, and maybe a yard or two more—not to say that she knew exactly where it would go under those conditions. Backing off a little, she could average 272 yards and keep the ball in the fairway.
Good enough for the Tour.
But the Tour didn’t pay for long drives; the Tour paid for low scores. So though she hit her three buckets of balls each morning and evening, she’d devoted most of her practice in the last year to the short game—and specifically, the game within thirty to sixty yards of the pin. Anytime you were standing in that gap, one of two things happened: you screwed up, or you were a little off, or a little short, on your second shot to a par 5.
So the next shot would either make par, if you’d screwed up, and therefore keep you in the game; or give you a birdie on the par 5. Both of those things were critical if you wanted to win on the Tour, and in the calendar in the back of her list book, she’d blocked out two months of thirty-six practice, two-and-a-half-hour sessions on Rattlesnake’s par 3, twice a day. Get up and down every time from thirty to sixty, she thought, and you rule the Tour.
As she walked out to the par 3, she let her mind drift to the coach at the University of Florida. He’d come up to see her, and they’d played a couple of rounds at Bear Path, over in the Cities. At the end of the second round, he’d given her a notebook and said, “Write this down.”
“A list?”
“A list,” he said. He was a tough-looking nut, brown from the sun with pale blue eyes and an eye-matching blue Izod golf shirt buttoned to the top. “This is what I want you to do.”
Over a Leinenkugel for him and a Diet Coke for her, and cheeseburgers with strips of bacon, he’d given her thirty putting drills and thirty more short-game drills.
“How long?”
“At least two hours a day,” he said.
“I do six now,” she said.
He looked at her, saw she was serious and said, “Then don’t quit, if you can stand it.”
“If it’d put me on the Tour, I’d do ten,” she said.
“We’re gonna get along just fine, Lucy,” he said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. “You do two hours a day, I’ll put you on the Tour. You do six hours and I’ll put you on the leader board in the Open. Whether you win or not… that depends on what you were born with.”
She looked flat back at him: “I been playing”—she didn’t say for money, but rubbed her thumb against her fingers in the money sign—“since I was twelve,�
� she said. “You give me a six-foot putt for two hundred dollars with forty-three dollars in the bank, and I’ll make it every time.”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled at her: “You’re giving me wet panties,” he said.
She’d decided on this day to work on the ninth green on the par 3. The ninth was slightly raised all around, a platform, with steep banks climbing six feet up to the green. The pin was near the back, and she walked around behind the green so she’d be coming in from the short side; and she’d use nothing but the 7-, 8- and 9-irons, punching short shots into the bank, letting the bank and the rough slow the ball down, so it’d trickle over the top and down to the pin. This was not a common approach. Most people would try to flop the ball up to the pin, as she would, most of the time. But sometimes you couldn’t do that—like if there was a tree nearby—and then you needed something different.
She was hard at it, punching an 8-iron into a spot two and a half feet down from the top of the platform, trying to control the ball hop, when she realized somebody was coming up behind her. She turned and saw Mitchell Drury.
Mitchell. He must’ve been forty, she thought. But you sort of thought about him anyway, looked him over, even if you were seventeen. That weathered cowboy thing, with the shoulders and the small butt.
“Lucy,” he said. His face was serious; usually he’d do a movie-star grin when he was talking to her—he knew women liked him. Not this time. “Gotta talk to you.”
“Sure thing. About Stevie?” She sat back on the bank next to the green and he plopped down beside her.
“Yeah… um. You know, I mean, everybody knows, he was seeing your mom.”
“C’mon, Mitch. That was over two months ago.”
“Over for your mom?” His eyebrows went up.
“Yeah, over. It ain’t the first time she’s had a romance out here—Christ, she’s only thirty-eight. I’m surprised you ain’t been knocking on the door.”
“Hmm,” Mitch said, his eyes cutting away.